If 2021 was the year I really focused on reading books by women, in 2022 the focus became reading works in translation, particularly books from Korea. Korea has been on quite a run in the world market of popular culture, it is obviously a culture of great interest beyond its most popular manifestations.
Published 1/6/22
Planet of Clay (2020)
by Samar Yazbek
Is the last National Book Award finalist for translated fiction left? I'm still short one finalist- Winter in Sokcho by Elisa Dupabin (also the winner). It was heartening to see a book on the list translated from Arabic, and even better that the author is a Syrian woman- major diversity points, and triple empathy points for a novel about a mentally disabled girl/teenager/young adult during the horrors of the Syrian Civil War. It's rough sledding- a fractured narrative. Just rough.
Published 1/6/22
Icebound: Shipwrecked at the End of the World (2021)
by Andrea Pitzer
Here is another example of a book I read simply because I'm trying to balance gender representation. This is a work of non-fiction, written by a woman, about a subject, artic exploration, that I happen to find fascinating. I'm generally interested in information about the icy north- certainly I watch many of the survival themed reality shows that populate the Discovery channel constellation of properties. I think it's also a function of living in Southern California and having limited exposure to cold of any kind. Pitzer's book is straight forward in recounting different episodes of would-be arctic explorers being stranded. It's not particularly obvious from the title, but this is a book about being shipwrecked at the northern end of the world, not the southern.
As you might expect, arctic capital E exploration was undertaken by men (I don't think there is a single woman mentioned in this entire book, which is written by a woman) who liked to keep journals, so there are a wealth of written materials for almost every incident that didn't end with the death of or disappearance of everyone on board. The main thing a contemporary reader will pick up is the astonishing lack of preparation taken by men trying to sail to the northern edge of the world. Like, they didn't have special jackets to wear for the cold until well into the 20th century. Dudes would just head out in their boats, and get frozen in ice for months, unable to do anything about it.
They also had to deal with tons of polar bears, who come off as not very sympathetic at all.
Published 1/6/22
Abundance (2021)
by Jacob Guanzon
Abundance was a 2021 National Book Award longlist in fiction. I found it hard to take and impossible to enjoy, like a novel length exploration of the chaotic life of one of my clients from state court. As a criminal defense attorneys, protagonists like the one in Abundance- Henry, the son of a single-dad immigrant at the lower levels of the American socio-economic ladder, describes a life that can only be described as a disaster: Not great at school, drifts into juvenile delinquency via recreational drug use, impregnates the first girl he sleeps with, keeps the child, marries the girl, goes to prison, chases the girl out of his life after getting out of prison. I've been a criminal defense attorney for 20 years and I've probably represented close to 2000, 2500 different human beings, and Henry's life experience tracks that of about half of those clients. Another 30 percent are just older versions of this guy.
And while I'm generally sympathetic to people and their problems, there is no question that I divide the world into two types of people. The first category is people who only need to spend a single night in jail to figure out what they need to do to avoid that ever happening again, and the second category is people who don't get that message. Henry is in that second category and I find him and his compatriots to be pretty exasperating.
Published 1/12/22
The Anomaly (2020)
by Herve Le Tellier
2020 winner of the Prix Goncourt
The Anomaly by Herve Le Tellier arrived in English as a certifiable hit, both critical and popular, with the Prix Goncourt cementing one side of the equation and 800,000 in pre-translation sales securing the other. Le Tellier combines genres: science fiction, thriller, relationship novel with a heavy overlay of
Oulipian theory. Listening to the English language Audiobook, the more esoteric aspects of
The Anomaly were lost to me, but the more basic intake still proved fascinating.
The Anomaly is one of those works of art whose appeal is irremediably compromised by divulging any significant detail of the plot- instead- it's the combination of genres and the critical and popular success that must draw the reader to engage. So for fans of science fiction-psychological thriller-detective story genres and books that win the highest level of literary award, you deserve to give The Anomaly a spin.
Published 1/12/22
The Memoir of Stockholm Sven(2021)
by Nathaniel Ian Miller
The Memoir of Stockholm Sven is the debut novel by American author Nathaniel Ian Miller. Owing equal debts to Jack London and Knut Hamsun, who are curiously never mentioned by the characters in any capacity, it tells the story of the life of Sven Ormson, a would-be intellectual who is unhappy working in the factories of Stockholm. He decamps for a northern mining colony, only to be horribly disfigured in a mining accident. Disconsolate, he seeks a new life in the even farther north, as a trapper and hermit.
That is the set up and you won't be surprised to learn that Sven doesn't sit by himself in a cabin for the rest of the book. People enter and exit his life, and it really is a whole life- the book ends after World War II, with Sven a senior citizen. Great sub-arctic scenery and plenty of lonely philosophizing. It's a promising vision from a young American novelist- literally miles from your typical first book about post-college young people living in a major metropolitan area. The third act drags and the narrative limps to its natural ending, perhaps in an attempt to evoke the "Memoir" of the title, but it's not a memoir at all, it's a novel, so I question the devotion to the form.
Published 1/13/22
Silverview (2021)
by John Le Carre
Silverview, the last novel by John Le Carre, was published posthumously this past October. It's an entirely domestic piece of spy fiction, revolving around the death of a woman who was an important theorist in the Middle East division of MI6 and the subsequent investigation of her husband, also a spy. The protagonist at the center is Julian Lawndsley, a 33 year old ex-"city man" (what we would call a finance bro) who has "retired" to open a book shop in a small East Anglican town. There he meets Edward Avon, the aforementioned husband- a curious man with an indeterminate European accent who loves W.G. Sebald and The Rings of Saturn. That's Le Carre in a nutshell, a spy novelist capable of creating entire literary universes filled with secret agents who read W.G. Sebald (I love Sebald, but I've literally never met another human being who has even heard of him outside of those I have specifically told.)
The spy stuff itself isn't 007 level, but then, when is it ever for Le Carre. Lots of interviews and skulking about, and recriminations about actions taken in the past for God and Queen. Le Carre will be missed, but at least he left 20 plus novels behind.
Published 1/13/22
Princess Bari (2010)
by Hwang Sok-Yong
Hwang Sok-Yong is one of South Korea's most famous novelists. In 1993 he received world-wide notoriety after he was sentenced to seven years in a South Korean prison for unauthorized travel to North Korea. Princess Bari is the story of Bari, named after the figure of Korean folklore. She escapes harrowing circumstances in North Korea, where she is raised near the border with China. Her father and extended family are significant officials in the local regime, but famine and a politically questionable relation lead to their downfall. The family scatters, Bari ends up in semi-hiding in China, just over the border, before she manages to escape to London.
There, the story becomes the familiar tale of the immigrant experience in contemporary London. As far as the second half of the book goes, the part which takes place in London, it is pretty rote- it's only the circumstances which Bari escapes from that make the western set chapters interesting.
Published 1/18/22
Harsh Times (2021)
by Mario Vargas Llosa
I was surprised by the lack of American press for Harsh Times, by Peruvian 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature winner Mario Vargas Llosa. After all, America had its greasy hands all over the events depicted in Harsh Times, the lead up and aftermath of the CIA-backed coup against left-leaning Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz, who was, upon reflection, a pretty decent guy who didn't deserve what he got. The style is an almost classical form of "new journalism" where Llosa fictionalizes the real-life participants or pastiches of those people, creating a deft, cinema/television influenced narrative.
Thematically, there is heavy overlay with his take down of Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo, The Feast of the Goat (2000), which, in my mind will forever link that dictator with his fictional(?) habit of deflowering virgins with his fingers because his impotence prevents him from normal intercourse. And ladies and gentlemen, if that is the kind of detail that bothers you, then steer clear of this book, which features "Miss Guatemala" the disinherited teen bride of a local magnate who becomes the consort of the dictator who replaces Arbenz after the CIA backed coup and then manages a Zelig/Forrest Gump type afterlife as an anti-Communist radio personality based out of the Dominican Republic.
Published 1/21/22
Being You: A New Science of Consciousness
by Anil Seth
I'm always up for a cross-over hit about neuro-science. Oliver Sacks and his hit The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat is emblematic of the genre, and the entries in this category range from the anecdotal to complicated-science-rendered-comprehensible-for-the-lay-person. Sacks would be on the anecdotal end of the spectrum, and Seth, and Being You: A New Science of Consciousness, is on the other. Seth is a major contributor in the scientific field of consciousness studies, and he is serious about advancing his primary thesis: That what we experience as "reality" is in fact a controlled hallucination assembled by our brain. In other, more colloquial terms, reality really is "an illusion," and a movie like The Matrix is more accurate than our traditional conception of reality being some concrete experience with an objective reality.
Examples, of course, abound, but one that should be familiar to all is the phenomenon of "the dress" which could be seen as either white and gold or blue and black depending on the viewer. The dress is a concrete example that reality is 100% subjective, because it tricks everyone's brain in the same way, and different results are obtained. Seth's research has revealed many interesting aspects of consciousness- another key finding is that reality tends to be shaped by prior experience- in other words, we will continue to see what we expect to see, even in situations where there has been a key change.
Published 1/24/22
Black Paper (2021)
by Teju Cole
Black Paper is a book of collected essays by author Teju Cole. Anyone who has read Cole's novels is well aware that he is incredibly erudite and sophisticated, a characteristic that manifests in his professional life, where he authors criticism for publications like the New York Times and teaches writing at Columbia University. My initial interest in Cole was spurred by his similarity to W.G. Sebald in terms of the themes of places and psychology (and tremendous, cross-cultural erudition) and I wasn't surprised to see Sebald referenced by Cole in these essays,
"W. G. Sebald, who, of the writers I have studied, might be the one in whom this intense, emotionally charged but intellectually unflagging approach is most pervasive. Sebald wrote entire books that are almost nothing but the headiness of an associative dream. The Rings of Saturn is a narrative of a fictional walk in Suffolk, the journal of a man who seems to carry around an antiquarian hypertext library in his head."
It was one of those "a-ha" moments but unfortunately I didn't take careful notes- which I should have because I checked the book out on the Library app in e-format (you can take notes via the Kindle App.) Alas, the hold at this point is several weeks long. There is no questioning that the collected essay format of literature is a weak sibling of the novel. Maybe a handful of essays in any collection have some kind of staying power, and then its like, you have to read the rest.
Published 1/26/22
All Systems Red (2004)
by Martha Wells
Science Fiction writer Martha Wells caught my eye this past year when she won a trifecta of science fiction awards for her latest entry in her series, The Murderbot Diaries. All Systems Red was the first book in that series- individual titles in the series are brief- novellas at best, lengthy short stories at not, but the whole series is a continuous, sequential story about one narrator, a "rogue" sec-unit, he gave himself the "Murder Bot" name- it is what it calls its self (no sex organs for murderbots) on a galaxy-wide quest to find out the truth about itself and it's past.
There is no denying the sophistication of Wells' treatment of complex subjects like AI. It looks like Recorded Books did Audiobook versions of all the titles in the Murderbot series, so it is a good opportunity for non-genre fans of potential cross-over literature to take a listen via your local Libby library app.
Published 1/28/22
H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life (1991)
by Michel Houellebecq
There is an actual H.P. Lovecraft museum up the street from me located in, of all places, the Glendale Burbank border. It's just a store front, with a storage area for their printing press in back- they publish books related to Lovecraft. It reminded me that French author and personal favorite Michel Houellebecq is a huge Lovecraft fan and that he wrote a book length (one hundred pages, anyway) essay about Lovecraft and his hatred of immigrants in New York City. I mean, that is the startling part, the rest is a by now concluded argument that Lovecraft is a canon level author. Was that an issue into the early 1990's? Is it still?
Published 1/31/22
Laser Printer II (2021)
by Tamara Shopsin
American author/illustrator has produced a little gem of low-stakes fiction, about a young woman working at an Apple repair shop in Manhattan during the decade or so when such stores thrived. These days it is common place to read reviews of graphic novels that are treated like novels instead of comic books, but this is the first novel that seems more like a graphic novel- the pages are rich with fetishization of the iconic Macintosh products of the 1980's. Laser Printer II is as much a story about the evolution of Apple itself- from a quirky, hobbyist friendly outsider to the behemoth of the Ipod and eventually, the Apple Stores that would forever render shops such as the one depicted in this book obsolete.
Laser Printer II is 224 pages long but it feels shorter, the characters seem sketched in pencil, and it is really the machines- Apple manufactured printers, that feel fully colored in.
Published 1/31/22
A Natural History of the Future: What the Laws of Biology Tell Us About the Future of the Human Species (2021)
by Rob Dunn
Rob Dunn, a biologist, has facts to tell us about the natural world, and how our actions influence the growth of life on planet Earth. He is hardly the only such person, but as biologist with a solid grasp of explaining complex ideas to civilians, he is well situated to put the point across. The main thrust of his thesis is trying to explain that evolution works much faster than we original theorized. Far from taking centuries or millennium of change that is invisible to the naked eye, it in fact appears that life, particularly microscopic organisms like germs and viruses, can evolve incredibly fast in ways that thwart human intent.
The major examples include antibiotic resistant viruses in hospitals and pesticide resistant bacteria on crops, but as the book progresses he expands the thesis to include a thorough discussion of relative adaptability of life (or lack of it) and makes the disturbing point that a future of climate change means that ALL life will have to reconfigure itself to new environments or niches, and that humanity, despite its enormous success, has not managed to expand its basic range of inhabitable land. Unlike antibiotic resistant viruses, we may not be able to adapt fast enough as a species, and it is this weakness, not client change itself, that may spell doom for the species.
Published 2/3/23
Lemon (2021)
by Kwon Yeo-Sun
The Kindle edition of this book had a blurb that said something like, "Favorite of BTS fans." What does that mean? I guess it means that Lemon was a big hit in South Korea with teens, even as the English translation is unlikely to escape the read in translation scene for the mass market. Usually though it seems like the Authors who get their works translated into English are "serious" authors, even as foreign genre work proliferates in other mediums, particularly television. Where are the foreign hits, I ask.
Nominally a work of crime fiction about the unsolved murder of a beautiful but absent high school student, Lemon is really about the impact of the murder on the victim's sister, Da-on. Her obsession with revisiting the events of 2002, the murder happens at the Apex of the Korean World Cup, colors her present, as she tracks down two of the potential perpetrators of the crime.
Published 2/7/22
Artificial Condition (2018)
by Martha Wells
Artificial Condition is volume 2 in her genre conquering series, The Murderbot Diaries, a richly drawn series of novellas that focus on the eponymous murderbot and his quest to unravel his identity. Freed from the necessity of serving the corporation after the events of the first book, Murderbot finds a way back to where it all began, a remote mining colony where he believes he murdered a group of his employers. He is helped on his way by a sentient spaceship and hooks up with a young group of engineers who specialize in locating advanced technology left behind by extinct spacefaring civilization.
It seems clear that each entry in the Murderbot series is more like an additional section of an ongoing story than a stand alone narrative. Given how short each episode runs, you wouldn't have to read them in sequential order, but it certainly would help to appreciate the growth of the cyborg protagonist.
Published 2/7/22
Mordew (2020)
by Alex Pheby
There is much one could write about Mordew by English author Alex Pheby but it likely to go unappreciated unless the reader has first read at least the first book in Gormenghast trilogy by Mervyn Peake. If you haven't read or at least heard of Gormenghast the odds that you will like Mordew is basically zero. Like Gormenghast, Mordew is what you call "low fantasy"- fantasy without a huge amount of magical or fantastical elements, where the fantasy is the vibe of the thing. Unlike Gormenghast, Mordew does have some magical elements- Nathan Treeves, an urchin of a decrepit, post-apocalyptic city controlled by "the Master," has special powers. His journey of awakening takes him to some very dark places- at times it was hard to decide whether Mordew is Harry Potter-esque by the way it weaves some troubling themes and images into a basically YA plot or whether Mordew is a work of fantasy for adults.
Whichever it might be, Mordew was a real discovery for me- highly recommended- and check out the Audiobook edition, which is fantastic.
 |
| Korean author Won-pyung Sohn |
Published 2/8/22
Almond (2020)
by Sohn Won-pyung
There is no denying the momentum of Korean culture in the international market for popular culture. You can start with the popular music: Any nation that can successfully export a boy band to the rest of the globe has proven that it belongs in the top tiers of local-international cultures. Then you can turn to Korean impact in peak television and film, where Korean work has won awards at the highest levels in the United States and also created the kind of cultural phenomenon one rarely identifies with foreign cultural products. A similar kind of flood hasn't happened in the higher echelons of international literature, where Korean authors are still marketed by independent publishers and less popular with the general audience than their music and film/tv counterparts.
Almond, which was a hit in Korea in 2016, and Sohn Won-pyung's first novel, is about Yun-jae, an almost orphan who is neuro-divergent in the sense that he can't process emotions, something that we would call being "on the spectrum" in the United States, the spectrum ranging from Autism to Asperger's. Autism doesn't appear to be a known phenomenon in the Korea of this novel- the title refers to the explanation Yun-jae is given for his condition, that his amygdala is too small, like an almond size. It means something that Almond arrives in English translation via HarperCollins, that is at least a step in the right direction in terms of elevating Korean language literary fiction in translation. Almond certainly left me asking the question whether Korea knows what Autism is or if that concept simply doesn't exist in Korea.
 |
| Fernando Pessoa |
Pessoa: A Biography (2021)
by Richard Zenith
I heard about Portuguese author Fernando Pessoa via the 1001 Books Project, where his The Book of Disquiet (1982) is one of those quirky titles that sticks with you. The amazing thing about The Book of Disquiet and its status as a canonical work in translation is that Pessoa died in 1935, and the ORIGINAL edition of The Book of Disquiet wasn't published until 1982. That is because Pessoa published very little during his lifetime, mostly poetry and essays, but when he died there was an entire trunk full of writing, all jumbled together. The Book of Disquiet was pieced together over the next half century, and then it was finally published, Fernando Pessoa was acknowledged as a fully canon level writer of international literature.
It takes your breath away, the whole story, which is why I was so excited for this 1400 page(!) biography of Pessoa by Richard Zenith. I read this book on my Kindle, and it took me literally months to finish. What's amazing about this book being 1400 pages is that Pessoa did practically nothing his entire life. He was raised in Durban South Africa- by far the most interesting thing that ever happened to him- then moved to Lisbon after he graduated high school and literally never left. He also never had a relationship, may have died a virgin.
At the same time he lived an extraordinary life of the intellect, creating dozens of "Heteronyms" or literary pen names, which he used to write on an amazing number of topics. He was very active as a public intellectual- essentially instrumental in bringing concepts like Futurism to Portugal and serving as an important hub for the Portuguese avant guard. Later in life, he was Alistair Crowley's man in Portugal. Despite a lifespan that ran from 1888 to 1935 (dead at 47) Pessoa presents as an extraordinarily modern man- post-modern, even, in the deepest, most sophisticated sense of those terms. It's hard not to compare him with Borges- with whom he shares an aphoristic quality. Borges, who famously spent his working life in the basement of a Buenos Aires library, seems to share a kinship with Pessoa, and I think eventually Labyrinths and The Book of Disquiet will be considered together.
Published 3/9/22
How High We Go in the Dark (2022)
by Sequoia Nagamatsu
This debut novel by American author Sequoia Nagamatsu has achieved middling to good reviews and is a genuine sales success- the Amazon listing has 380 reviews, which is good for a first-time novelist writing at the intersection of literary fiction and genre (science fiction). On that particular spectrum (literary fiction/science fiction) this book leans heavily towards the former. It is specifically marketed as a novel, but it is also a series of interlinked short stories, separated in chronological time during a world ending plague and the lengthy aftermath. The characters overlap from story to story and he does deliver an ending that ties everything together in a way you would expect from a novel, but there is no denying that this is a book of interlinked short stories, not a novel in the sense of a single narrative with a fixed cast of characters. It's not a problem for me, I'm just saying that, formally speaking, that structure makes this book more literary fiction than science fiction.
Nagamatsu's apocalypse is pretty low key- capitalism survives even if wide swathes of the population do not, and the story arc isn't the conventional one of every human dying (or a cure being discovered and life returning to the pre disease status quo)- Nagamatsu follows a different path, with a much longer timeline enabled by the linked short story structure. As far as individual stories go, some were very conventional literary fiction and others pair that approach with some genuinely interesting genre content. Surely the success of this book means that there will be more to come for Nagamatsu, and if How High We Go in the Dark doesn't reach the prize stage for any literary award, it's entirely possible his next book will.
Published 3/16/22
Anthill of the Savannah (1987)
by Chinua Achebe
It's funny because Things Fall Apart, Achebe's classic- is so widely read- I think it was assigned to me my freshman year in high school, then in college the teacher who taught creative writing was a scholar of African literature who helped "break" Achebe in the West (back when Professors of African Literature were white dudes.) Anthill was published two decades after his previous one- A Man of the People in 1966 and helped to revive interest in his earlier work. That said, I'd never actually seen copies of ANY of Achebe's books in a book store until I saw a remaindered copy of a repress of this book in the Harvard Book Store a couple years back. I bought it as part of my program to privilege diversity in my reading- and canon level writers who are not white guys are universally benefiting from that decision.
Anthill of the Savannah is a bleak take on the gradual moral corruption that accompanied many mid 20th century military style African dictatorships. Sam, the Dictator, employs Chris, a former newspaper editor, as his minister of information. The events unfurl in a way that should surprise no one familiar with the currents of 20th century African history but I can't think of another book where the perspective is so "inside baseball," usually books with this kind of theme take place at ground level, or at least removed from the corridor of power, as the various elite machinations impact innocent bystanders. In Anthill of the Savannah, no one is innocent .
Published 4/4/22
Index, a History of the (2022)
by Dennis Duncan
Index, a History of the is one of those books that will be read by 100% of people who squeal with delight at the idea of a whole book dedicated to the history of...the index. It makes a certain amount of sense that a book about the history of the index would follow the rise of the E reader and the broader phenomenon of being able to search text on a computer for any word or combination of words within a document or book. The index, after all, is the analog precursor of this function.
Our common definition of an index is an alphabetical list of subjects- ideas and people that is placed at the end of the book, so that a reader can search for a specific subject within a given text without having to guess or read the whole book. What appears common-sense to us today was, as Duncan reveals, anything but, with a long winding road before the common index took shape.
Much of this history took place well before the printing press made books every-day possessions. Like many other developments in western literary culture, the development of the index was a function of Europe's obsession with the Bible, and the need for scholars to be able access specific passages. The very first indexes tended to be what we would today call a concordance- an attempt to list every occurrence of every word in a specific text (the Bible) in alphabetical order. The problem in the beginning is that they weren't indexing a book with standard pagination- in the era of hand written texts, every book had different pagination.
The extension of these techniques to secular concerns was slow in coming, and generally tied to increases in the knowledge production economy- closely tied to said printing press and the university system of scholarship. As you get closer to the present, literary culture began to gain an appreciation for the possibilities of indexes as meta-texts- telling a short story by the creative use of an alphabetical index, for example. Indexes can be used for inside jokes, or to settle literary scores.
Published 4/4/22
My Annihilation (2022)
by Fuminori Nakamura
There are really only a few questions a prospective reader needs to answer before deciding whether to read the new novel by Fuminori Nakamura, a prize-winning writer of crime fiction from Japan:
1. Am I interested in reading one of the best writers of Japanese crime fiction?
2. Do I mind if the book I read by one of those writers is a total mind fuck to the point where I will have trouble figuring out what is even happening in the book?
If you give a hearty yes to both questions, then My Annihilation is likely to thrill you- a sui generis riff on a convoluted revenge plot that owes equal amounts to Samuel Beckett and David Lynch. And although I was delighted to see an Audiobook version available to check out from the library, I would have preferred to read a hard copy so I could have kept track of what the fuck was actually going on.
Published 4/3/22
Moon Witch, Spider King (2022)
by Marlon James
I've been a big fan of Jamaican author Marlon James since his 2014 Booker win for A Brief History of Seven Killings, his kaleidoscopic banger of an epic about the life of Bob Marley. Not only was Brief History a great book, it was cool as shit, like rock and roll, in a way that literary fiction very rarely is. In 2019 he followed Brief History with the first book of a proposed three volume "African Game of Thrones" which would actually be three books about the same set of events, told from the perspective of the different actors. The first book was Black Leopard, Red Wolf, which got good but somewhat cautious reviews. Many people commented about the gore and graphic sex and other bad behavior- which- again- is something that I love about James, he hates what you might call the "Iowa Writers Workshop" school of literary fiction, which descends directly from Virginia Woolf and her high modernist ilk and featured what can charitably be described as a troubled relationship with sexuality and all topics related to sexuality.
I've said it before on this blog, spare me the 300 page musings of writers from privileged backgrounds who went to elite schools before compromising their ideals with marriage and children. I'll read books featuring similar description if they sell enough, or get enough good press, but I don't want to read books like that. I'd prefer more literary fiction which deals directly with the fact that humans are, after all, animals. I'm also an avowed fan of the cross-over between science fiction, fantasy and literary fiction. Those two genres, and excluding books who had those themes but classified as "general fiction," constitute close to 20% of the books I read in a year. 15% for all of last year, and close to 25% this year so far.
I really enjoyed the first book in this trilogy, and the arrival of the second book, Moon Witch, Spider King, written from the perspective of Sogolon the Moon Witch- who features in book one as a quasi-villainous figure. It should come as no surprise to readers of the first book that volume two surpasses Volume 1. Part of this has to do with the structure of the trilogy- James is telling the same story three times, from three different perspectives. If you stop and consider, of course, the first book will be the least succesful, because the energy is going to be generated from the relationship of each book to the other.
At the same time, there is no need to start with Volume 1. In fact, I would say Volume 2 is a better starting point, because Sogolon's life spans centuries, and the reader really gets a wide-angle perspective on the universe James has created- something that is entirely absent from the first book. I think any James fan has to defend the graphic sex and violence of not just these last two books- but all of this books- John Crow's Devil (2004) and The Book of Night Woman (2009) both contain show stopping acts of both sex and violence. But why should genre have all the fun? And more importantly, why can't prissy privileged intellectuals get over the now century old issues that the culture of literary fiction has with the forthright, graphic depiction of sex and violence. I mean honestly, the Anglo-American culture of literary fiction is as staid, if not more staid, than it's bourgeois and working-class counterparts. So more power to Marlon James, and all hail Sogolon the Moon Witch- it is a tale worth telling, and I can't wait for the prestige television version which is sure to follow after the third volume comes out.
Published 4/1/22
April in Spain (2021)
by John Banville
For me, Irish Booker Prize winner John Banville has the most interesting trajectory in literary fiction. For many years in he carried on a double life under the nom de plume Benjamin Black, where he was modestly successful with his line of Detective Fiction starring Dublin pathologist Quirke. Then, in 2020 he released Snow, a very Banvillian work of detective fiction. Finally, last year he released April in Spain, which was the eighth book in the Quirke line, but the first published his own name, abandoning Benjamin Black to his fate.
The way I read the sequence of events, Snow drops in 2020 and becomes, by far, his biggest hit ever- the Amazon listing has 6600 reviews vs. 1100 for the next most popular Banville title. His editors are like, "You know John, it is ok for you to write genre fiction under your real name, this isn't the 19th century, detective fiction has its own legitimate place in the literary canon." And Banville is like, "Do I?" and then he starts getting the checks from Snow and he's like, "Yup."
Which brings us to April in Spain which is, as I said, a very conventional work of mystery-fiction about a young woman who goes missing, reported dead, under sordid family circumstances (think Chinatown,) only to be discovered by a drunken Quirke on holiday in San Sebastian in northern Spain. It is certainly enjoyable, and certainly well written. I enjoyed the San Sebastian location, having travelled there myself about a decade or so ago. And it's written by Booker prize winning author John Banville, so it made me feel like I was reading a work of literary fiction rather than a genre title.
Published 4/3/22
The High House (2021)
by Jessie Greengrass
This Costa Novel Prize shortlister written by British author Jessie Greengrass ticked all my boxes for a spontaneous Audiobook listen: Nominated for a major literary award, written by a woman who isn't from the United States and has a heavy apocalypse theme in a literary, not genre, way. There you go, that's all I need to give a book a shot.
Caro, the main protagonist and one of three narrators, is the daughter of a man who is married to Francesca, her step mother and world-famous climate scientist. She has a younger half-brother, Pauly. Francesca and her Dad buy a house in an isolated part of England and commence turning it into a home to survive the end of the world. Caro's perspective is that of the spoiled young adult hating her evil stepmom and she turns into an excellent example of an unlikeable central protagonist, particularly when she is contrasted to Sally, the daughter of a local who Francesca recruits as a caretaker in the event of her eventual demise (and also a some-times narrator, along with younger half-brother Pauly.)
It is a hard and fast rule of the apocalypse in literary fiction that the perspective is always limited- sky-level overviews are strictly for genre works, and The High House doesn't disappoint, the characters never leave the immediate environs of the house itself, and the landscape plays a near Sebaldian role in the story (see nomination for major literary award.) Events are witnessed via the television, and after that, the characters are left in isolation.
Gradually, Caro comes to realize what everyone else in the book figured out long ago, that The High House is a remarkable act of parental love.
Published 4/3/22
The Books of Jacob (2014)
by Olga Tokarczuk
The English language translation of The Books of Jacob, the 2014 magnum-opus by 2018 (awarded in 2019) Nobel Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk arrived earlier this year with full fan-fare befitting a recent Nobel Prize winner. This 912 page work of historical fiction set in almost entirely in mid 18th century Eastern Europe did not just get an all territories (US. UK, AUS, etc) wide release, it also got it's own 35 hour plus Audiobook edition- which I was able to snag immediately from the library- I also bought a hardback copy for my library.
Obtaining the Audiobook was one thing, listening to it was something else entirely. Fortunately, I was already engaged with the plot- about the messianic Jews of mid 18th century Eastern Europe. Tokarczuk isn't the first author to tackle the subject. See, Satan in Goray by Nobel winner Issac Bashevis Singer, which more or less covers the exact same territory but focuses on the mid 17th century instead- messianic Judaism was a phenomenon for centuries in Eastern Europe and it has actually impacted the contemporary practice of Judaism by popularizing mysticism in the context of Judaism.
I haven't seen anyone comment on the fact that Tokarczuk is not Jewish, and how this might impact an understanding of the work. In fact, given the length of the book I've had trouble finding any reviewers who have addressed any aspect of this book beyond a basic description of the length, subject matter and biography of Tokarczuk, who is still basically an unknown quantity in the United States. I am by no means a specialist in the subject area, but I have done the basic reading- enough to know that Tokarczuk is not taking any kind of liberties with her descriptions.
I've seen it written elsewhere, and I fairly agree, that "Pynchonian" is a good description, The Books of Jacob sprawl in such a fashion that at times I wanted a map- which is a feeling that I often have when reading or listening to one of Pynchon's books. I'd have to imagine that this book is a lock for the Booker International prize- Tokarczuk already won for one of her lesser works, and it is difficult to imagine any of the other competitors overcoming the sheer prestige of the publication of a major magnum opus by a Nobel Prize winner.
The Books of Jacob is certain to become a major literary flex in the coming decades, worth the effort, but maybe look into the Audiobook to spare your eyes. Also worth mentioning is that there is nothing experimental in terms of the technique- i.e. it reads just like any other work of historical fiction, more or less- state of the art of course, but recognizable and not "difficult" in any way beyond the sheer heft of it.
 |
| Cover of Living in Data by Jer Thorp |
Living in Data (2021)
by Jer Thorp
Jer Thorp is a guy who works with data- he gets hired by non profits, businesses and government institutions to look at the ways the do (or do not) manage data, and recommend improvements. He has an interesting perspective on data and the many ways its management impacts us positively and negatively, and this book is an attempt to share that perspective with a general, creative non-fiction reading audience- it's published by FSG, not an academic press and the design of the cover looks smart and expensive.
Like the last book I wrote about, Living in Data is an all or nothing proposition either you have to read it once you hear about it, or it's like, why would you ever. So too with Thorp's individual chapters: Do you want to hear about how he helped to develop a tracking system for indigenous wild life in Africa that simultaneously empowered local communities to benefit from the collection of said data? If so, I've got the book for you (this book.)
One of the thoughts that I had while reading about Thorp's attempt to make the world a better place through data, is just how empowering the opposite has become through the democratization of data access. You still have the same major players: State actors, wealthy individuals and stake holding businesses, but you also have have hackers, trolls and memelords, three groups that wouldn't be possible without the distributed power of data (for example, think about the hackers of the pre internet era- stealing long distance phone calls.)
Published 4/5/22
Elena Knows (2021)
by Claudia Pinero
Argentinian author Claudia Pinero is best known in South America for her crime fiction- where she is a regular on the best-seller list for her genre work. This non-genre book is on the Booker International Prize longlist this year. Elena of the title is an elderly woman, suffering from the increasingly severe symptoms of Parkinsons disease, trying to unravel the circumstances of the alleged suicide of her spinsterish daughter, who has devoted her life to taking care of her Mother.
Elena Knows is an interesting variation on the unreliable narrator, Elena is obssessed with finding the "real" truth behind what appears to be a straight forward suicide by hanging. Gradually we learn the truth, perhaps, as always the reader is left guessing a little bit.
Published 4/11/22
A Psalm for the Wild-Built (2021)
by Becky Chambers
Although
A Psalm for the Well-Built (2021) is strictly a work of genre science-fiction, it has a couple of characteristics that seemed interesting enough to warrant a listen to the Audiobook. First, A Psalm for the Well-Built is an example of the newly coined "
Solarpunk" genre of science fiction. The term was coined in opposition to cyberpunk, which typically features dystopian, tech heavy scenarios. Solarpunk, on the other hand, is set in futures where humans have solved/escaped today's contemporary problems through the use of innovative, non-earth destroying technology or risen from the ashes of the destruction of a society more like our own and learned the appropriate lessons about not destroying the planet.
The question given such a scenario is how does a writer generate the kind of conflict necessary to engage a reader, surely the reason that dystopian futures have proved so pervasive in science fiction is that the necessary conflict exists before the writer even pens a word. The other interesting characteristic is that this is the first book I can remember reading where the third person omniscient narrator uses the singular they to refer to a protagonist who does not possess a named gender. The stroy of A Psalm for the Well Built has nothing to do with gender: It's about the relationship that develops between a human "tea monk" and a "wild built" robot, robots have escaped human enslavement in the distant past within this particular future universe.
As for conflict, there isn't much- but perhaps that is because this is only the first chapter in a proposed series of titles about this world.
Published 4/11/22
Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century (2022)
by Kim Fu
Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century is another good example of the permeability of the membrane between science fiction and literary fiction. While the description of each short story in this collection sounds like an average science fiction short-story: Bride meets sea-monster, woman moves into house invested with swarms of bugs, insomniac falls in love with a literal Sandman; the actual stories themselves seem closer to the territory of literary fiction, with the protagonists dwelling obsessively over their personal unhappiness or regrets over past relationships as common themes. In other, words, basically, the same territory as non-science fiction short stories written by other authors in North America.
Fu is pronoun agnostic, but her website identifies her as agender, and her first book was about the experience of a transgender youth. If gender was a subtext in any of these stories I missed it, in fact, I was a little dissapointed with the conventionality of the human relationships that Fu depicts in this book.
Published 4/12/22
Drowning Practice (2022)
by Mike Meginnis
I've been really interested in the intersection of genre science fiction and literary fiction, particularly as it relates to the apocalypse/post-apocalyptic subgenre. Much of the action in this space of the marketplace is with semi-succesful or already succesful writers of literary fiction adding science fiction themes in what I can only imagine is either an attempt to drive interest in the book or a legitimate reflection of growing interest in science fiction by writers of "serious fiction." It's probably both.
For me, the turning point was in 2017 when Kazuo Ishiguro won the Nobel Prize after publishing two heavily genre influenced work in a row- Never Let Me Go (2005) was a straight forward science fiction/dystopia set up, and The Buried Giant was reworking of what might be called "Arthurian fantasy." At that point, it would be hard for anyone working in publishing to claim that science fiction or fantasy couldn't be serious literature.
In Drowning Practice, every human on Earth has the same dream which features an authority figure telling them that the world is going to end on November 1st. This simultaneity of an event taking place across all of humanity is enough to convince everyone of the truth of the message. The protagonists are Lyd, a semi-succesful writer of literary fiction who suffers from clinical depression, Mott, her unbelievably precocious 10 year old daughter, and David, her psychotic CIA spy of an ex-husband. I gather from the reviews that the reader is supposed to be charmed by 10 year old Mott, who, I shit, you not, decides that the one thing she wants to do before the world ends is write a novel.
Only in the universe of contemporary American literary fiction would a book about the end of the world give you not one but two characters who spend most of the book musing about the meaning of literature in the wider world. So while I was more or less annoyed the entire time I was listening to the Audiobook, I did finish it, which says that Drowning Practice isn't insufferably boring despite the characters being obsessed with the progress of a novel written by a ten year old. Also it's yet another work of American literary fiction where one of the major characters is a sad, wealthy, well-educated white woman who has ambivalent feelings towards motherhood. Truly, truly, truly a subject I would avoid if I could.
Published 4/12/22
Sea of Tranquility (2022)
by Emily St. John Mandel
Welp, Canadian author Emily St. John Mandel is surely over the hump, heading towards a long career in the upper echelons of the Anglo-American world of literary fiction, based on the critical and audience success of the HBO Max version of her 2014 novel, Station Eleven. I've managed to not finish the book version of Station Eleven, the Audiobook version of Station Eleven AND the television show, so I wouldn't characterize myself as a fan, but like always I'm interested in the intersection of literary fiction and science fiction themes, and therefore Sea of Tranquility, Mandel's new book, which is both a time travel caper novel AND a sequel to her well received 2020 novel The Glass Hotel (prestige TV version on the way!)
In fact, I actually went out to my local Barnes & Nobel and bought the hardback, which I mildly regret because Sea of Tranquility clocks in at barely 200 pages (with large margins, blank pages between chapters, and chapters that are under fifty words each.) I tried to savor the experience but there is no way I could have taken longer than two hours to read this bad boy. The short length probably bodes well for the potential audience size- I picked my copy off a stack that was on the official Barnes & Noble book club table, and it makes sense. Sea of Tranquility actually reminded me of a science fiction novella written by someone like Ray Bradbury or Isaac Asimov, but of course written by a contemporary author of literary fiction. As you might expect there isn't much "hard" science fiction where the characters spend pages of exposition describing various impossibilities (like time travel) to the reader.
I think St. John Mandel deserves credit for writing a time travel caper book when the obvious trend has been towards alternate histories and parallel universes, retro and brave at the same time, her choice, I would say.
Published 4/18/22
The Lincoln Highway (2022)
by Amor Towles
This was our book club pick this month. I look forward to book club as an opportunity to read the popular bangers that I would normally avoid like the plague. It's interesting readying books that have big sales numbers as long as I have an acceptable excuse. Towles, to me, is in the same category as James Patterson and John Grisham- he spend close to twenty years as an investment banker before publishing his first novel, The Rules of Civility, in 2011. The Rules of Civility was a modest success, i.e. it only has 12,000 Amazon reviews, vs. 42,000 for A Gentleman in Moscow and 43,000 already for this book. A Gentleman in Moscow, 2016, was a monster hit and it really set the table for The Lincoln Highway, which arrived in fall of 2021 to universal acclaim and monster sales figures.
It is unclear to me if Towles is serious enough to win a Pultizer, but this book has the feel of those mainstream hits that the Pultizer Prize often embraces. The story involves three juvenile delinquents and the kid brother of one of the three. They all meet at a juvenile detention facility in Nebraska, despite the fact that two of the three are from New York and have, as far as I can see, no business being at a juvenile lock up facility in Nebraska during the 1950's.
One of the three is let out and heads back to his Dad's sad farm- his Dad being one of those "only in literary fiction" types of a New Englander from a wealthy background who decides to become a farmer in Nebraska, only to fail miserably. Do people like that exist in real life? Needless to say, hi-jinks ensue, including a hobo style train journey to New York, multiple adventures inside and outside the environs of New York, and a quest to retrieve a half million dollars from inside a locked safe inside the palatial "cabin" of the deceased grandfather of one of the three former inmates.
 |
| Author Missouri Williams |
The Doloriad (2022)
by Missouri Williams
One of the consequences of striving for gender equity in my reading is trying to avoid books written by women from well off backgrounds about the difficulties of motherhood and relationships. I'd rather read anything else. So when I hear about a work of literary fiction written by a woman and it is some sort of foul minded post apocalyptic nightmare about the lives of an incestuous family which has managed to survive the end of the world, I say to myself, "Sign me up!" The Doloriad is interesting on a couple different levels. First, there is the high modernist technique, a variety of stream of consciousness narratives by various mal-formed monster humans.
The Doloriad... is really something. What it is exactly, beyond foul and kinda breathtaking, and beyond that, it just stands out among the welter of sad family melodrama that dominates literary fiction in the United States, whether written by men or women.
 |
| British author Claire Kohda |
Published 2/27/22
Woman, Eating: A Literary Vampire Novel (2022)
by Claire Kohda
I've been involved in publishing- via my record label, for over a decade, and the hostility displayed towards artists- musicians, writers, actors, every artist at the relationship between commerce and art has always struck me as comical. Or at the very best, an anachronistic attitude directly related to 18th century romanticism and its ideas about the genius apart as creator. The vibe for Woman, Eating: A Literary Vampire Novel, was very Ottessa Moshfegh writes a vampire novel. I would argue that Moshfegh has the heart of a decadent in the sense that she descends in a direct line from the prose of Joris-Karl Huysmans and his book Against the Grain.
It goes without saying that a vampire novel that carries the subtitle of "A Literary Vampire Novel" does not take its premise of vampires particularly seriously, rather the vampire is a motif for an exploration of what it means to be mixed-race in contemporary British society, about the role food plays in the integration of immigrants. Anyway, I loved every second- loved, loved, loved the Audiobook and the narrator of the Audiobook. One of my favorites of the year thus far. Certainly a top five title for me heading into the midyear.
Published 5/25/22
The Ministry for the Future (2020)
by Kim Stanley Robinson
I've read a few different summary articles revolving around the literary trend of "cli-fi" which is short for climate fiction- a label that seeks to eschew the combination of the words science and fiction. Climate focused science fiction is as old as the genre itself, but J.G. Ballard wrote a well known novel called The Drowned World in 1962 that was clearly set in a post-Global Warming environment. The modern idea itself, that emissions of carbon causes greenhouse gases to heat the earth dates to the 1950's and it was popularized in the 1980's. Obviously it's still controversial. Kim Stanley Robinson is a prolific writer of best-selling science fiction that is known for being progressive in terms of the suite of ideas being advocated, scientists as heroes, the conquest of space, if not in terms of his representations.
When
The Ministry for the Future was released in 2020, Robinson gave many interviews where he indicated that he was trying to use his powers of imagination in a more or less concrete manner and that the intent of
The Ministry for the Future is serious. I found his take absorbing. The Ministry for the Future is created by the UN to represent future generations and given a budge and headquarters in Switzerland. World action is galvanized after a "
wet bulb" incident (when combined temperature and humidity prevent the human body from cooling down, resulting in death) kills 20 million people in India, and things begin to happy.
The head of the Ministry of Sound is a former Irish politician who seems to be modeled on
Mary Robinson, her main aide a ex-Nepali Marxist by way of Indian operator who heads their "black ops" division. They are helped on their way by the so-called Children of Kali, an amorphous, poorly described network that perpetrates hugely succesful global acts of terrorism. Robinson introduces ideas by the bucket full that draw from across the ideological spectrum- blockchain based currencies pegged to carbon removal, drilling through the Antarctic ice and pumping water up to be refrozen, genetically eliminating all cattle on earth with a modified mad cow virus, shutting down air travel by bringing down hundreds of private planes.
Again, while reading
The Ministry for the Future I had the same thought I often have when thinking seriously about the future, which is that any kind of monstrous, global disaster that wipes out half of humanity would quite easily be a net win for the environment and the Earth itself. It's hard to make any kind of logically consistent argument in favor of humanity as an ever expanding species. Surely there needs to be some kind of limitation of the endless EXPANSION of human activity and humanity itself. Obviously, the personal decision whether to reproduce is the only thing an individual can control, but isn't there a seriously strong argument against the endless expansion of economic activity? The ultimate weakness of the neo-liberal economic order is that
the externalities of fossil fuel driven economic activities- those costs that are not assumed by the business earning the money from the activity- subsume the profit because eventually the world will end because of that activity.
So who will stop these businesses? Only state or super state level actors. And can Democracies do it? Probably not, because these businesses are huge interest groups in every democracy in the world. That leaves non democracies and non state actors, so Dictators and Terrorists, or I guess, a UN Agency run by an Irish politician. I wouldn't bet on the UN.
Published 5/25/22
Checkout 19: A Novel (2022)
by Claire-Louise Bennett
I was wowed by Checkout 19, the latest book by English author Claire-Louise Bennett. The narrator is a uni student in the UK, working at a grocery store during breaks and musing on her past as she works. The entire book takes the form of a monologue a la Thomas Bernhard- who is my favorite author. Thus, I loved every minute of Checkout 19, and it made me wish there were Audiobook editions of Thomas Bernhard's books. I wish there were more books like this one that I could read and Claire-Louise Bennett is an important voice in contemporary literary fiction.
Published 5/31/22
An Island (2021)
by Karen Jennings
An Island, by South African author Karen Jennings was a surprise on the 2021 Booker Prize Longlist. A year later, it finally gets an American release courtesy Penguin Random House. I'm surprised that we don't get more South African writers of literary fiction released in the United States since, it seems like it be hard NOT to write an interesting book about South Africa. Unfortunately literary fiction is not exempt from the golden rule of the American culture-industrial complex: Americans are mostly interested in other books about America. Same goes for film and music. In fact, a major preoccupation of people who work in the culture industry is finding cultural properties from outside America and either importing them directly or reworking them for an American audience.
This book is about Samuel, a reclusive light house keeper living in an unnamed country that escaped colonialism only to succumb to a post-colonial dictatorship. Jennings is careful to keep everything generic- there are no place names or culturally specific names that would allow the reader to peg Malcolm's experience to a specific place. The same goes for race, though I found myself assuming that Malcolm was a black African. Jennings is white and her choice to keep things vague also probably helped her avoid difficult questions related to her "right" to tell such a story.
Samuel's tedious day-to-day existence is jarred when a refugee washes up on his island- still alive. As he hides the refugee, he reflects on his live and the experiences that have led him to the island- a misspent youth, tangential involvement in post-independence protests and years in prison. Jennings packs a lot into this short novel, only 224 pages, and like reading Coetzee, I was left with the impression that Jennings had created a small masterpiece.
Published 8/1/22
Lapvona (2022)
by Ottessa Moshfegh
Ottessa Moshfegh is one of my favorite American authors of literary fiction working today- I look forward to each of her books since her break out hit (My Year of Rest and Relaxation.) Also, I went back and read all of her earlier publications excepting her book of short stories. What I like about Moshfegh is that she moves around in place and time. You've got McGlue- set in Salem in the 19th century. Eileen is set in small-town New England in the mid 20th century. Death in Her Hands and My Year are both contemporary, though the former takes place in the country side and My Year is a very New York City kind of book. I would describe that quality as "range." Ottessa Moshfegh has range, and it is often range that is sorely lacking in contemporary American literary fiction, with its surfeit of stressed out mothers and nervous fathers.
With Lapvona she invents her own fictious land- it's what we would call the Middle Ages, in someplace that resembles the petit feudalism of medieval Europe. Lapvona is not a fantastical place- quite the opposite in its resolute grimness. The world is grim, the characters as well. Those looking for uplift are best warned away ahead of time. The obvious comparison within her own bibliography is McGlue, though McGlue is squarely within the 19th century vein of American literature that reached its apogee with Moby Dick, i.e. tales of the sea and seamen, Lapvona doesn't clearly fit into any pre-existing genre that I'm aware of- certainly historical literary fiction is a pre-existing genre, but Lapvona doesn't resemble that sort of book.
Perhaps the closest comparison would be to The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro- which is a work of gentle fantasy (which Lapvona is decidedly not.) No, Lapvona is in no way gentle. It is in fact, Brutal. It is one of those books which loses impact if you know what is coming, even though it is in no way a book with a twist.
Published 8/1/22
Trust (2022)
by Hernan Diaz
There is always a bit of lull for me in the reading year- starting in mid June and running until the Booker Longlist is announced in July. I'm always inclined to wait for that longlist to come out before I venture beyond the books that grab at me from my feed. Americans were strongly represented on this year's longlist- notably Nightcrawling by Oakland's own Leila Mottley, The Trees by USC literature professor Percival Everett and two books that I had already passed on until their inclusion made me reverse myself- Booth by Karen Joy Fowler and this book, Trust by Hernan Diaz.
I'd read reviews when Trust came out earlier this year- I was both ignorant of the author, Hernan Diaz, which reflects poorly on me, not him, and leery of the elevator pitch, "Metafictional text about an extremely wealthy early 20th century Financier and his wife." It sounded interesting but not compelling, but after the Booker Longlist arrived I quickly checked out the Audiobook from the Los Angeles Public Library. Trust is a set of four different texts: The first is a work of fiction a la The Financier by Theodore Dreiser. It's called Bonds, and its tells the ultimately tragic tale of the first and greatest Wall Street operator and his arty wife. The next text is notes towards an autobiography written by the "real life" inspiration for the main character in Bonds. The third text is a New Yorker type article by a woman who served as the personal secretary for said inspiration when he was writing his autobiography. The final text is the pay off, and none of the reviews I've read actually discuss it, leading me to believe its revelation would consitute a "spoiler."
I quite enjoyed Trust, though I'm not sure its a short lister- it might be a National Book Award and/or Pulitzer Nominee- vibe-wise Trust reminds me of Richard Powers- a recent winner and author of a book- Gain, that really reminds me of Trust, in that it attempts to convey an economic narrative in a novel. I'm very into that idea, and I wish there were more books that took economics and money seriously- I often have the thought while reading literary fiction from American and the English speaking world, that every writer of literary fiction is a teacher of literature or a journalist. Any novel that takes me outside of that narrow world is a win.
Published 8/9/22
The Trees (2021)
by Percival Everett
The Trees is another 2022 Booker longlist pick written by an American author. Everett, a Professor of Literature at USC, is a classic author where I am just amazed to be hearing about for the first time after a nomination for a major literary prize. Dude teaches in Los Angeles, where I live. He has been publishing novels since 1983. He is African American, and many of his books contain edgy satirical themes, which are some of my favorite themes in literary fiction. None of his books are about newly divorced urban intellectual dads or nervous urban intellectual expectant moms. And yet, literally had never heard of him before he got nominated this year. Shame on me!
The Trees is an interesting blend of crime fiction, satire and allegory that takes off after the mysterious deaths of two Emmett Till-adjacent rednecks in a small town in Mississippi. The local sheriff is non-plussed when the state of Mississippi sends up two African-American agents to assist with the investigation into the lost corpse of an African American found with both dead racists. The plot spins out from there, written from a variety of perspectives but mainly shifting between the two state investigators and the local sheriff. There is also a female African American FBI agent who joins the fun, an ancient local woman who has compiled files on every lynching in the history of America (including police shootings, which she says, "count as lynchings."
Everything stays pretty close to the parameters of a work of southern crime fiction written from a contemporary African American perspective until... they don't. It is, of course, this divergence from traditional genre constraints that elevate The Trees into Booker longlist territory, a la Paul Beatty's 2016 win for The Sellout. The plot really goes off the rails in the third act and the last fifty pages is bonkers mccrazy stuff. Readers will have to abandon any expectations formed by the semblance of the beginning of The Trees to a more or less conventional work of crime/supernatural/fiction and adapt to what Everett is really saying but I found The Trees provided an almost visceral satisfaction upon completion. I don't think it will make the longlist, but I'm glad to have heard about Everett- I will certainly be taking a look at his back list this fall and winter.
Published 8/9/22
Hitler: Downfall (2021)
by Volker Ullrich
I love a new book about Hitler! Knowing jokes about obsessions with "Hitler Studies" are at least as old as White Noise, the 1985 novel by Don Delillo, where the protagonist is a professor of the subject. I confess that while I am 100% not a "Civil War, World War II" type of reader of popular history, I 100% am interested in the great totalitarian states of the 20th century: the Soviet Union, Communist China and the Nazi's. There is so much to learn about totalitarianism and its intersections with with the other great isms of the 20th century: capitalism, socialism, media culture, economics.
And the nature of totalitarianism as a movement is that you get a powerful leader at the top and, you know, the decision making process, and the way that this guy convinces others to do his bidding, even when the bidding is just bat shit crazy insane- there is a lot to learn about human psychology on the road to murdering six millions Jews and ten million Russians.
What the reader learns about Adolf Hitler from Downfall is that Hitler was a gambler who liked to "bet big on a single card," a phrase that is repeated so frequently during the forty hours of Audiobook runtime that I will forever associate playing cards with Hitler's battle strategy on the Eastern front. This strategy worked wonders for Hitler on the way up- a prime example of an individual seizing the moment, again and again, against the grain of "conventional wisdom."
This run of wins lasted all the way up to his terrible decision to invade the Soviet Union. What I learned is that because of his run of wins- from his assumption of power through the defeat of France, convinced the German Army Generals- who were at best Nazi's of convenience, at worst openly contemptuous of Hitler's very being- that Hitler might actually be a genius.
The reader also learns that Hitler was amazingly consistent about his desire to eliminate European Jewry and his refusal to rationally contemplate something other than total victory. For Ullrich, the war was essentially lost for Nazi Germany after Operation Barbarossa- the surprise attack against the Soviet Union- stalled outside of Moscow. Mind you, this took place before Pearl Harbor. Hitler's years long refusal to contemplate the reality of this situation led to untold suffering on both sides.
As the war drew to conclusion, Hitler became increasingly isolated from reality. In one memorable scene, he spends the day of the Allied invasion of France (D-Day) micromanaging the deportation of half a million Hungarian Jews. In the end, he became obsessed with a Wagnerian defeat that would also spell the annihilation of the German people. Fortunately, this was a step too far even for his own followers, who ensured that his orders to raze German industry to the ground in advance of the invading Americans, British and Russians were not followed.
At all times, it seems like the premature death of Hitler really would have been one of those great moments upon which history turns. It is hard to imagine the Nazi's moving forward with the Holocaust in the absence of Hitler's monomaniacally obsession with the subject. The chapters devoted to the different attempts to rescue the Germans from Hitler are the most moving (only moving?) chapters in the entire book.
Published 10/4/22
Haven (2022)
by Emma Donoghue
Irish-Canadian author Emma Donoghue is best known for her 2010 novel Room, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2010 and inspired the 2015 film of the same name which had some box office success and really launched actress Brie Larson into stardom. Haven caught my eye because of the plot summary: Three Irish monks living in the early middle ages set off to a rocky island off the coast of Ireland (a skellig) to create a monastery in the middle of the ocean. Skellig's themselves have been having a bit of a moment since they were featured as Luke Skywalker's retreat in the most recent series of Star Wars films. I was attracted to the storyline and the locale.
Donoghue crafts an interesting narrative of survival and conflict in harsh surroundings. She also throws in an unexpected twist beyond the "will everyone survive" tension that motivates any plot involving people trying to live on a skellig without access to the outside world for trade goods. Listening to the Audiobook, the physical descriptions of the skellig sent me racing to Google Maps to look up the locations which inspired the book.
Published 10/9/22
The Colony (2022)
by Audrey Magee
The Colony, the second novel by Irish author Audrey Magee was longlisted for the Booker Prize this year. Like a great many of the Booker longlist nominees every year, I had never heard of Magee, so I was happy to check out The Colony, about an English painter who travels to an isolated island off the coast of the Irish Republic during the time of the Troubles in Northern Ireland (1979, specifically).
The main characters are the English painter, his would-be protégé, a young man who dreams of escaping said isolated island and a French linguist who is making his final trip before publishing his thesis about the survival of the Gaelic language in this isolated place. The chapters advancing the plot are interspersed with factual descriptions of what I believe were real atrocities committed against civilians in Northern Ireland during the troubles- by both side- that typically involved civilians either being caught in the cross fire or murdered for suspicion of collaboration with the wrong side. Whether the two streams will intersect provides one point of tension within the narrative, the other the conflict being the English painter and the French linguist- the former representing the "new" way- tourism for English speaking guests and the later trying to preserve the Gaelic language.
The Colony is a classic Booker longlist situation: Several types of tension developed in a single narrative, with a resolution that is satisfying but not obvious.
Instagram