2023 Books: January to June

 2023 Books: January to June

   June 1st, 2023 is a critical date for this blog because that is when I posted about the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project.   The other thing I was doing during this period was consolidating old posts- most of the posts in January and February were tied to time periods and author nationality, 1930s American Literature on January 20th, 2023 or themes: Writing on Aesthetics January 29th, 2023, Collected Writing on World History to 2022, January 31st, 2023.  The idea behind the consolidation was two-fold, first, recognizing that without editing and maintenance, writing on the internet can disappear, so I figured I should reduce the number of posts so it would be easier to remove them if required.  The second part was recognizing that having the post sit there forever meant that no one would ever look at them again, whereas, if I recycled and combined them it would trigger the revisiting of my site from many sources- bots mostly- but still.

  I'm not claiming that the rise in visits comes from HUMANS- my understanding is that most internet traffic is bots, but honestly it doesn't matter, the fact is that since I began this editing process in 2023 the monthly visits went from between 5 to 10 thousand a month- a figure which had remained constant between 2011 and 2023 to a number between 10 and 20, with occasional spikes of 46,000 (August 2023), and even 115,000 last month.  Clearly and obviously the editing process generates more traffic of all sorts to this blog.

Published 1/29 23

Malarkoi (2022)

by Alex Pheby

Book 2 Cities of the Weft Series

   I try to stay away from the "multi-volume" fantasy series world for a couple of reasons:  First, who has the time. Second, the idea of a fantasy author, a genre author, maintaining narrative momentum over a single volume is slight, the idea of a fantasy author being stylistically innovative, or even interesting, slighter.  Third, most fantasy stays in a pretty narrow groove that hasn't received an update since the dawn of human storytelling:  Magic, fantastic creatures, the hero's quest- you can move the furniture around the room and swap in different cultural influences, but all fantasy needs to be familiar to counter-balance all the extra explaining required of how magic works in this book, which creatures exist in this book, etc. 

  There are exceptions- Alex Pheby and his (projected) three volume Cities of the Weft series is one.  Marlon James and his Dark Star Trilogy would be another.  I was thrilled to pick up the hardback UK edition on a recent trip to London- the American edition has a place holder page over at Macmillan and there on questions on the internet about when Tor, the US publisher, is planning on releasing Malarkoi in the United States.  Malarkoi follows Mordew.

  Mordew tells the story of Nathan Treeves, a neglected street urchin living in Mordew, a gloomy city that appears to exist in some far-future, decades or centuries after the collapse of some version of the modern world.   What stands about both books- Mordew and Malarkoi, is that Pheby has actually managed to generate an interesting fantasy world.  You can count these creations on a single hand since the overwhelming majority of fantastical universes are based on one or more present or historical human mythology. 

  I believe that Pheby draws on Gormenghast Series by Mervyn Peake.  Published between 1946 and 1959, the Gormenghast books represent an alternative to the  Northern European mythological world of J.R.R. Tolkien, who was, of course, an early translator of the Icelandic Saga's into the English language.  This world, with it's elves, dwarves and hobbits represents the dominant strand of fantasy.  Peake, on the other hand, draws on worlds of human literature- Dickens and Robert Louis Stevenson.  There is also a heavy dose of the gothic, similar to the influence it shows in non-gothic books like those by Jane Austen and the Bronte's.  In other words, this is a world of fantasy constructed by literature- I'm talking about the Gormenghast series by Mervyn Peake- and Pheby is a successor in this world of alternative fantasy. 

   Unfortantely, discussing Malarkoi without the background of Mordew is pointless, and if you have read Mordew and not Malarkoi, any discussion of the plot of the latter would function as a spoiler.  But I did want to write to say that I think this fantasy series should be an exception for fans of literature who don't normally read fantasy.

Published 1/31/23

Walt Disney: The Triumph of the Imagination (2007)

by Neal Gabler

   I live in Atwater Village, roughly mid-way between Disney's second studio on Hyperion Ave in Silver Lake (present day Silverlake Gelson's parking lot) and the Burbank studio.  Signs of Disney are all around- the restaurant down the street, the Tam O'Shanter bills itself as "Walt Disney's Favorite Restaurant" and has a plaque commemorating his favorite seat.  The model railroad he built at his personal home was relocated into Griffith Park and remains open on a semi-regular basis.   In fact, it would be easy to stake the claim that the literal home of Disney and all he built is that swath of territory between the Hyperion Ave studio and the Burbank Studio, which is basically Silverlake, Atwater Village and southwestern Burbank.  But no one ever says this, and you can live for years in Silverlake without anyone pointing out that the studio that turned out Snow White and the Seven Dwarves (1937) was located in the Gelson's Parking Lot.

  Walt Disney is one of those protean figures of American Popular Culture who can seemingly represent anything to anyone.  At various times in his career, he was a Kansas City advertising agent, an upstart visionary with a dream to raise animation to an artform, a struggling small business-man, a pioneer in the use of color and sound in film, a internationally lauded visionary, a government shill for militarism, a militant anti-communist strike breaker and, of course, the creator of Disneyland itself.

  All this is magisterially described by author Neal Gabler over the course of over 900 pages or 33 hours in Audiobook form.   Calling this biography exhaustive doesn't quite do the narrative justice, particularly when you consider that Walt Disney's personal life takes up about a twentieth of the text, and most of that is his "formative years" growing up in the midwest.

  Disney was convinced from an early age that he was going to revolutionize animation, well before he got to Hollywood.  After a stint driving ambulances/being a gofer in the aftermath of World War I in Paris, he started an animation company in Kansas City that didn't work out.  After that he moved to Los Angeles, following his older brother Roy, who had worked as a bank clerk and relocated to Los Angeles for health reasons.   The early years were times of struggle, where Walt and Roy fought against their own distributors and the vagaries of the marketplace for silent black and white animation.

  The breakthrough came in 1928 when Steamboat Willie, featuring a young Mickey and Minnie Mouse, was the first cartoon to use sound.  It's success was the first of many pop culture sensations created by Disney, and its financial success put Disney on the path to worldwide domination.  Prior to that, a move from the first Disney Brothers studio in what is now East Hollywood to their Silverlake Hyperion studio was the other major development in Disney's embryonic period.  Alongside the Mickey cartoons he began to churn out, Disney had another early success with his series of "Silly Symphonies," beginning with the Skeleton Dance in 1929, that brought a new, non-narrative dimension to Disney's animation art, and began to attract attention from artists and intellectuals.

   While the Mickey series and Silly Symphonies were chugging along, Disney began to plot his first feature- something that had never been tried before and was widely seen as impossible given artistic and audience constraints by contemporary observers.  Snow White and the Seven Dwarves was a years long obsession of Disney's, and if you were to select a single canonical work released by the Disney Studio, surely it would be Snow White and the Seven Dwarves (1937).   The result was universal critical and popular acclaim- both domestically and abroad, where Snow White was nothing less than a sensation.  Circa 1937 Disney was hailed as a genius by both intellectuals and normal folks, communists and conservatives, adults and children. Disney bristled at the idea that his cartoons were from children and insisted on only focus testing adult audiences well into the 1950's. 

     Unfortunately, the long turn around time between features meant that Disney's next film, Pinocchio (Feb 1940) was released after the German invasion of Poland, meaning that it was hardly released internationally.  Domestically reviews were mixed, with many critics arguing that Disney had failed to anticipate the shift in mood that resulted from the knowledge of war in Europe.  Fantasia was released in November of 1940, and was largely received as a masterpiece, but Disney's insistence in installing his own sound system limited box office receipts in the US, and the war made foreign distribution impossible, meaning that both films were financial calamites. 

  After Pearl Harbor, Disney found himself working for the government making training and propaganda films.   He also found himself grappling with workers unions, and this period was clearly a nadir for the man and his work, culminating in the Disney Strike of 1941 and his bizarre Victory Through Air Power (1942), a highly influential movie he released supporting the development of long range bombers.  During World War II Disney became disenchanted with the Studio, mostly because the worker strike and the events leading up to and afterwards shattered Disney's vision of his studio as a little workers utopia. 

   After the war, he retreated- he was less involved with  Dumbo(1941) and Bambi (1942) and between Bambi and Cinderella (1950) he presided over the least august period in Disney studio history, eight years where the highlight was The Song of the South(1946), a movie deemed so vile by posterity that it has been removed from circulation.  Disney canon carefully omits this fallow period.  It was during this time that he entered his "model railroad period," where he was entirely withdrawn from studio work and bizarrely became obsessed with building his own scale locomotive and accompanying track.

   However, all became clear when he formally separated himself from the studio, essentially selling his name to the studio he still owned and starting his own separate holding enterprise.  It was this new business that became Disneyland.  A writer seeking to evaluate the works that Disney contributed to the canon can stop at this point- Disney studios went on to reel off hit after hit for the ensuing decades, but Walt Disney was not part of those films.  Disneyland is an incredibly consequential development on many levels but it is not a "work of art" like a novel, short story, poem or film. 

   Looking past Disney in terms of animation in film, 1995 emerges as a critical year.  In 1995, Disney released Pocahantas but they also released Toy Story by Pixar- thereafter it would be Pixar which represented the cutting edge of filmed animation and Disney itself would be relegated to second place, artistically speaking.  Nor would Pixar be the first to challenge Disney's preeminent position- as early as the 1940's Bugs Bunny emerged as a credible challenger to Mickey as a leading man of the cartoon world.   As early as the 1940's, critics were critiquing the "Disney" style as being insufficiently sharp-edged for an America at war.

    In conclusion, I think the canonical Disney works are Snow White and the Seven Dwarves (1937) as a strong, unassailable number one.  Number two would have to be Fantasia (1940), a movie I recently rewatched and will treat separately.  Third would either be nothing or Bambi (1942) or Cinderella (1950).   The argument for "nothing" is pretty strong on the grounds that Snow White is the first AND the best so it takes both slots as the early representative and the best representative work.  Bambi has a good case in terms of the post-release initial release revision of the film into an all time classic.  Cinderella has an argument as being the film that restored his artistic reputation after nearly a decade in the doldrums and it also represents an example of the mid-period style- which itself encompasses classic-but-not-canon films like Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, Lady and the Tramp, Sleeping Beauty, 101 Dalmatians and the Sword in the Stone, films that were released in order between 1951 and 1963, followed by a lengthy period of extended mediocrity before The Little Mermaid (1989) after which the releases and sub-studios multiple the point of incomprehsibility. 

Published 3/22/23

The Deluge (2023)

by Stephen Markley

   I read the reviews of The Deluge, Stephen Markley's "brilliant but uneven" 900 page long climate apocalypse novel with a tinge of despair.  I continue to have great difficulty post covid (last June!) when it comes to reading a book, I used to be able to read complex non fiction and literary fiction for hours on end without respite, now I get distracted after ten minutes.  BUT I did manage to snag a copy of the 41 hour(!) audiobook from the Los Angeles Public library.  I consider myself quite a connoisseur of the literary apocalypse- I must have read at least 30 books on the subject of apocalypse literary fiction and another dozen that would be considered genre works- science fiction, horror etc.  And of course I've dabbled to a greater or lesser degree in the television shows and what not.  

   After all that experience I am still left with some major unanswered questions.  Chief among those:  How, exactly, does the apocalypse go down?  Most texts start at the proverbial "day after" and those that deal with the "fall" tend to be staged from a single person trying to escape the immediate consequence of the collapse of a civilization.  None of the books I've read- the genre fiction title 2034: A Novel of the Next World War- which takes you all the way through a nuclear war between the US and China- being the exception- actually detail how the world ends.

   Stephen Markley aims to fill that void with The Deluge which is a gigantic sprawling mess of a book that proved tedious to read but, like the slow rolling climate disasters of the book, ends up packing a wallop.  The plot of the deluge seems like something Markley came up as a kind of coat rack to develop his central narrative of the shape and feeling of the end of the world at the hands of global warming/climate change caused by increased carbon counts in the atmosphere.  First and foremost, The Deluge is a book about the human made disaster of climate change and the forms that disaster will take in the next several decades.

  Talking about the individual characters verges on the absurd since they all exist as placeholders for different parts of the narrative- you've got the "manic pixie dreambgirl" of global warming, Kate Morris, who works for change from within while her own appetites run wild.  There is the gay, autistic, muslim science advisor to the government who provides lengthy briefings peppered with personal anecdotes.  There is the poor, white, ex-drug addict Midwesterner swept up into the ecoterrorism movement, there are the ecoterrorists themselves, the list goes on.  Markley intersperses these personal narratives with interstitial newspaper articles, television reports and later monologues delivered from inside personal VR universes.

   The events of the novel itself are the visceral equivalent of torture porn for American democracy- Markley, gleefully, I imagine, takes America of the near future off the deep end of electoral democracy and then lingers- I must say- I went to college in Washington DC and the detail with which he depths to which American democracy sinks left me, at times, breathless.   It's not all genius but as a novel of ideas The Deluge left me stunned, and, it might be worth, noting, wondering if Markley is advocating the violent assassination of "climate villains" and the nationalization of the American oil industry... because it kind of seems like it.

Published 3/30/23

Age of Vice (2023)

by Deepti Kapoor

   Age of Vice by Indian author Deepti Kapoor was on my radar as soon as I read this lede from the New York Times, which appeared on January 5th of this year:

Deepti Kapoor’s second novel, “Age of Vice,” is a luxe thriller, set in New Delhi, that rides the line between commercial and literary fiction so adroitly that it will almost certainly move a lot of units, as I’ve heard publishers say about their best sellers.

    The line between commercial and literary fiction is an obsession of this blog, and I love literary fiction that comes from south Asia- be it Pakistani, Indian, Sri Lankan or Bangladeshi, so Age of Vice appealed to me all the way around.  I considered buying a hardback version but based on the length it seemed like a bit much.  I've observed that subcontinental fiction that makes it to publication in the United States tends towards the Dickensian in a sense that all locales for fiction have a 19th century vibe, even when the book, like Age of Vice is set mostly in India in the first decade of the 21st century.

   There is a ton I could write about this book and contemporary subcontinental fiction that "crosses over" to achieve an impact in the United States, where the native interest in stories FROM south asia (vs. stories written by the American descendants of immigrants who are writing about their experience in America) is roughly zero.    The bottom line is that Kapoor has done something very impressive here as a writer who is actually FROM India:  She has written a book with characters and a plot which appeals to American readers of literary and commercial fiction.  BRAVO.

  I waited to get the Audiobook from the library because of the sprawling, polyphonic nature of the plot which starts out written from the perspective of Aja, a low caste/dalit from Utter Pradesh who is sold into slavery by her mother after his father is murdered by some local goons for a minor property crime (letting his goat graze the fields of a higher caste neighbor).

   Aja is working in a Himalayan mountain cafe when he gloms onto Sonny, who is the scion of a Godfather-esque figure operating out of Delhi with roots in the wilds of Uttar Pradesh which has a population north of 200 million in addition to the metro area of Delhi.  In a certain, very Hindu centric sense Uttar Pradesh IS India proper, but at the same time Delhi has a very cosmopolitan air thanks to the permissive Muslim rulers, the Mughal Emperors, who controlled the Indian heartland before the arrival of the British.  

    The length of Age of Vice works against it's impact and overall merit as a work of literature, but it also probably plays a large part in why FX optioned it for a limited television series- 500 pages- several distinct voices, Age of Vice works better as prestige television adaptation then it does as a work of serious literary fiction.  However, as a work of commercial fiction, it is an absolute 100% banger.  Hit city baby.  

Published 4/13/23

Cold People (2023)

by Tom Rob Smith

   The Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy by Liu Cixin is about as big as you can get in the world of science fiction of fantasy, each of the three volumes won multiple awards in the English speaking science fiction world and Amazon bought the rights for over one billion dollars.  Those books chronicle the long-term demise/survival of the human race at the hands of a cruel and unyielding universe.  I am, of course, a huge fan.

  I'm mentioning this because Cold People, the latest book from strangely named author Tom Rob Smith, reminded me of something cooked up after the author had actually read the Earth's Past trilogy because this book strongly resembles an episode in that trilogy.  Specifically, in the trilogy, the aliens finally arrive on Earth and they order all of humanity to relocate to Australia within a year and refusal to comply will be a death sentence.   This is just one episode an a trilogy that spans millions of years of human time, but it strongly resembles the set up for this book:  Aliens arrive and give all of humanity 30 days to reach Antarctica.  

  There are, of course, significant difference starting with the location of the removal: Antarctica vs Australia.   Also, in the Earth's Past books, the aliens are characters in the books, we know about them and their back story.  In Cold People, there is no contact with the aliens and the removal is often referred to as an intergalactic eviction of humanity for failure to properly care for the planet.

  Smith tells his story in the familiar style of the international thriller- making this book interesting in the sense that is a straight science fiction book TOLD AS an international thriller- Smith shifts between continents and back and forward in time to bring this cast of characters together in Antarctica before the plot is set in motion, namely that the best and brightest of what remains of world science has decided that the only future for humanity is the extreme manipulation of the human genome.

     Like the Earth's Past books, Smith grapples with the question of how much humans can change before they cease to be human, both in terms of the concrete examples of genetically modified creatures with human dna and in terms of the decisions made by humans to obtain those results.  As an expansion of the ideas and themes of the human removal chapters of Earth's Past, Cold People represents an interesting take.  As a stand alone thriller/sci fi I was left with many questions, specifically, about why humanity's best and brightest would jump straight to making "para-humans" and more without trying to modify the genomes of "ordinary humans" first- to be more resistant to cold, for example.

   Anyway, for anyone interested in the subject, Cold People is interesting but it doesn't strike me as an international best seller because it is so unremittingly dark.

  

Published 4/14/23

Audiobook Review

Old God's Time: A Novel (2023)

by Sebastian Barry

 Sebastian Barry is an Irish novelist and playwright known better on the other side of the Atlantic even though many of this books have been set in the New World.  That's how I discovered him, reading his novel from 2016, Days Without End which is about a gay relationship in 19th century frontier America.  The writing was sharp and the characters well observed.  I remember the reading experience fondly. In 2020 I also read the follow-up, A Thousand Moons, which carried forward the story of the same family, this time focusing mostly on their adopted daughter.   What I did not do is go back and read his back catalog, which features eight older novels one of which was a  Costa Prize winner.  Barry is also a perennial on the Booker Prize longlist, but without a win. 

  Barry's latest book, Old God's Time: A Novel, takes us back to Ireland.  Tom Kettle is a retired policeman, decamped to the Irish coast, determined to live out his retirement in a faux-castle.  He is a widower, and his children are city people, with a son in America. His quietude is disturbed when he is visited by two young policemen asking questions about the unsolved murder of a child molesting priest several decades ago.

  Unraveling the past is the concern of Old God's Time and while it takes the form of a detective novel, the contents are straight literary fiction- no tired genre tropes here.   There can be no description of plot points in a review of a book like this because it will spoil the reading/listening experience.

Published 4/26/23

The Invention of Art: A Cultural History(2001) 

by Larry Shiner

   If you want to know the true worth of obscure academic titles- this book, published over twenty years ago- cost 30 bucks on Amazon, used, and 35 bucks, new, which shows you basically that people hold on to their copies and not many people donate them/sell them off, etc.  I could see the value before I read the book- since The Invention of Art: A Cultural History is a synthesis both of the history itself, which is semi-obscure AND the development of the theory surrounding that history, which is more obscure and took place largely outside of the United States and the English language.

  The idea of a transcendent and universal art is now going on nearly a century of being attacked from all sides.  Today, the only people left who would argue of the existence of some universal criterion of artistic merit and aesthetic beauty would perhaps be the Catholic Church and people who watch Fox News.   For everyone else, that ship has sailed but it is worth knowing the story of how we got from there to here since one of the consequences of being "here" is that people abandon all criterions of artistic merit and argue that aesthetic beauty doesn't exist, or shouldn't, or is completely subjective in which case, why bother with art at all except as a personal expression of traumatic biography.

   The Invention of Art does such a good job summarizing this history that I took my library book copy to my office, copied large portions of it and scanned in the notes and bibliography.  It's been my experience, running a record label for the past 15 years, that almost everyone in a creative endeavor considers themselves a capital A artist.  Actors, musicians, everyone.  The phenomenon of "everyone an artist" and "the culture of creatives" is intimately tied to the discussion in Shiner's book, starting in the romantic period, where the idea of the transcendent artist took root.  Originally only very specific types of artists could claim this mantle- poets were right there in the beginning.  Painters and sculptors.  Drama.  Beginning in the 18th century poetry began to expand to what we now know as "literature" though the acceptance of novels as literature was a long time coming.   Also in the 18th century music came into its own as an accepted art- this is a particularly interesting discussion, since today music is synonymous with what most people consider art.

   In fact, up until the 18th century music was a functional endeavor with musicians called to compose work for a specific occasion and such work was reused and reformatted without regard to the preservation of a specific "work."  It is the growth of this concept, that of the specific "work" that Shiner singles out as an important inflection point.  In this same sense he points out the importance of the legal significance of the passage of a copyright bill in England after which an author of a work could claim payment for the reproduction of that work by others.

  It is a fascinating topic and if you ever see a copy of this book on the shelf of a used book store for twenty bucks or less you should grab it.

Published 4/26/23

Audiobook Review

Our Share of Night (2023)

by Mariana Enriquez

  Argentinian author Mariana Enriquez first showed up on my radar back in 2021 when I read her short story collection, The Dangers of Smoking in Bed.  At the time I noted her ability to combine conventional short story themes you find in most literary fiction with what can only be described as "body horror."  Thus, when I saw that her new book, Our Share of Night, an occult fantasia set against the backdrop of the turmoil of mid 20th century Argentina, was the February recommendation of the Good Morning America Book Club (!) I knew I was going to have to check it out.

   I was able to snack the Audiobook- which runs a cool 30 hours- not that I minded, because Our Share of Night is equally riveting as a sprawling occultist horror novel AND as a very specific novel about the life experiences of people in 20th century Argentina (with a side trip to Carnaby street era swinging London).  From my perspective, both sides of the equation worked.  You could pick at either strand from the perspective of genre fiction or literary fiction, but the combination was quite intoxicating.  Enriquez's grasp of the particularity of 20th century occultism- her fictional "The Order"- a British-Argentinian "cult of the shadow" that traces is it's existence to a chance discovery by a pair of amateur folklorists in the wilds of 18th century Scotland could be ready equally as a metaphor for capitalism or for the international culture of literary fiction.  

  It's also familiar to anyone who knows anything about 20th century occultism- the darkness is summoned through the use of a medium, the medium give out garbled but powerful instructions on different subjects that seemingly range from the transcendent (the transmigration of consciousness from one body (older) to another (younger) body is a particular obsession, but it also sounds like the cult was given economic advice which allowed them to prosper on both sides of the Atlantic. 

   The form of the narrative is sequential, with narrative responsibilities for each member of a nuclear family unit of father, wife and son who have their own relationship to "the order" and to 20th century Argentinian history.  Anyway there can be no doubt that Our Share of Night is a banger.  The Audiobook was great I would recommend it.

Published 5/15/23

Audiobook Review

Biography of X (2023)

by Catherine Lacey

   Every week I skim the New York Times Sunday Book Review section for new books to read.  They do a terrific job keeping up to date with everything going on in the first and second divisions of publishing, especially as it relates to keeping up on fiction.  The idea of an overwhelming multiplicity of options simply isn't true if you restrict the category to "Literary fiction that gets a contemporary review in the New York Times Book Review".  If that is the specific category you are talking somewhere between 0-10 books a week, with many weeks with zero prospects.  I mention that now because Biography of X 100% came to my attention via the the review written by Dwight Garner. I'm not ashamed to admit it- nor am I ashamed that I had never heard of author Catherine Lacey, despite the fact that she's written three prior books that all garnered significant praise, if not qualifying as the kind of "hit" that would have brought her to my doorstep.

   The Biography of X is many things: A rich counter-factual history that takes it place alongside The Plot Against America in the annals of succesful alternate history/literary fiction cross-overs.  It is a rich inquiry into what it means to be a capital A artist in the 20th century.  It is a sometimes tedious take or parody of the genre of "oral history" popularized by magazines like Spin , Rolling Stone and Esquire, with an additional overlap between the self-seeking inward looking feature journalism synonymous with the New Yorker under Tina Brown.   It is a "secret history" of the downtown art world of New York from the 60's through the 90's.   In the end, all of these threads combine for a 1 +1 = 3 type of impact that left me reeling and has me searching for an opportunity to buy a first hardback edition at an independent bookstore so I can go back and see in print what I may have missed on the Audiobook (which is fabulous, this audiobook).

   If you are looking for specific details, I would refer you to the New York Times book review I linked above- personally, even though it was necessary to get me interested in the first place, I found that the NYT review did indeed spoil some of the choicest counter-factual historical moments.   It doesn't spoil the pay off of the plot- which is substantial.  You make your way through the sometimes awkward "oral history" format- with lots of "quoted from the interview with the authors" and footnotes to imaginary publications and there are times where a reader or listener might question whether it is worth it.  But it is- the ending is indeed worth the awkward superstructure.    I have no doubt that Biography of X  has all the makings of a cult classic, if not a straight-up classic.

Published 5/30/23

 Ninth Building (2022)

 by Zou Jingzhi

  Congratulation to Time Shelter by Bulgarian author Georgi Gospodinov and his translator Angela Rodel, winners of the 2023 International Booker Prize for the English language translation of Time Shelter.  I was able to check out the Audiobook from the LAPL hours after the announcement, which should give you an idea of the ambient audience for Booker Prize winners among the citizens of Los Angeles/patrons of the LAPL.   I don't love it so far.

  Meanwhile, I'm finally getting my Ebook holds for books from the longlist, many of which weren't even out in the US when the list was announced.  Ninth Building, by Chinese author Zou Jingzhi, was the first title I've managed to obtain.  It's an episodic work of autofiction about the author's experience as one of the so-called "educated youths" who were instrumental to enacting the terrors of the cultural revolution, then essentially deported to the provinces in an attempt to regain control by the Chinese Communist Party.  It was a fascinating, horrible time, up there with other fascinating/horrible 20th century world events- well- I won't put a list together but the cultural revolution is like a top 20 world historical event for sure in the 20th century.

  Like much Chinese literature that makes it out of China, Ninth Building was vetted by the CCP- this means it bears the characteristics of all 20th century "Official" literature- authors are allowed to critique historical events within the context of individuals who are not "good" government officials, but the government itself is never criticized.  So, Ninth Building is interesting, but not very revealing about the subject.   

Published 5/30/23

Will and Testament (2016)

by Vigdis Hjorth

   Norwegian author Vigdis Hjorth is another nominee from the 2023 International Booker longlist.  I couldn't track down the nominated title- Is Mother Dead- the LAPL just recently got a copy of the Ebook which I have on hold- but I found an available Audiobook of her 2016 work, Willa and Testament.  I was intrigued by the description of a Norwegian writer of autofiction, since Karl Ove Knausgard is himself a Norwegian.  A quick internet search reveals that Hjorth has appeared with his ex wife, Linda Knausgard, who has penned her own version of the events chronicled in My Struggle.  Norwegian autofiction is a hot commodity- even if the French don't want to admit it. 

   One thing about Norwegian autofiction, read one book by an author, read them all, so I'm guessing that Will and Testament, a characteristically fraught tale about a family squabbling about an inheritance and deep family secrets (the narrator was molested by her father between the ages of five and seven, and the rest of her family, mother and two sisters, don't believe her).   That's not a spoiler- you know from page one that the narrator and her father don't get along because of something she did to her when she was a young child.  The continuous narrative is chopped up into 80 plus different chapters and presented non-chronologically.  It might have been confusing but the narrator is so obsessed with this single situation and it's impact on her family dynamic that it is impossible to get confused.  She simply doesn't discuss anything else. 

  As in every work of auto-fiction, the level of self-obsession is off the charts, mirroring culture and the way it has been impacted by the internet even when the protagonist of a work of autofiction never uses the internet, as is the case here. As an attorney who frequently represents women who were the victims of familial sexual abuse, I found Will and Testament fascinating, but it might easily trigger others for whatever reason.

Published 5/30/23

 The Offset (2021) 

by Calder Szewczak

   First of all, Calder Szewczak is not one person, it's two, an arrangement you see infrequently in European literature and almost never at all in the Anglo-American world.  One is Natasha Calder the other Emma Szewczak.  Together they penned this interesting variation of dystopian fiction where the set up is that every child born needs to choose one of their parents to be sacrificed on their 18th birthday.  Cheery, I know!  Calder Szewczak's dystopia is set in London, where Miri, a street urchin who happens to be the daughter of the scientist in charge of humanities last attempt at saving the world:  Planting radioactive resistant trees enough to cover the whole of Greenland (Don't ask it is extremely complicated!).  

  Miri, who, it must be said, does not come across as sympathetic in any way shape or form, has already declared that it will be her famous scientist mother to die, rather than her retired doctor mother.  The narrative shifts between the perspective of Miri and famous scientist mom- while Doctor Mom does her best to convince Miri to kill her, Doctor Mom, and not famous scientist mom.   Meanwhile famous scientist mom has discovered something amiss with her world saving tree farm and must investigate.

  There is much to like in The Offset, particularly the straightforward portrayal of a world where having children is frowned upon- they call it anti-natalism in this book, and it isn't entirely clear to me that they are supposed to be unsympathetic, but personally I've often wondered why more people aren't explicitly anti-having children.  Seems like an eminently reasonable position considering (gestures vaguely) all this but how could one even voice such an opinion in public without being castigated.   Life, after all, is precious, unless the baby is born in one of the many places on Earth where human life is almost worthless, in which case, good luck!

Published 5/31/23

A Girl's Story (2016)

by Annie Ernaux

  I don't think anyone was shocked when Annie Ernaux, and avatar of French autofiction, won the Nobel Prize for Literature last year.  After all, Scandinavia is itself a hotbed of autofiction and you could probably argue that the French invented it.  Autofiction is itself uniquely suited to the internet era of relentless self-exposure. Although the roots of Autofiction trace back a half century at this point (1970's France is where the term was first coined), you could say that it took the internet and it's culture of self-obsession to really get a larger, international audience interested in these books.

    A Girl's Story will ring familiar to anyone who pays attention to influencer culture or youth culture- Ernaux's self protagonist is a young woman from a rural background studying at university.  From her current situation she reflects backwards on her adventures as a teen:  Experimenting with her sexuality as a camp counsellor (and being shamed and persecuted for it), dropping out of teaching school to become a nanny in London, shoplifting sprees with her nanny bff.  It sounds banal perhaps but there is nothing tedious about Ernaux's prose in translation.  I found myself fascinated with the depth of exploration of inner feeling.   

Published 6/5/23

Time Shelter (2022)

by Georgi Gospodinov

   Time to take a break from the 1001 Novels: A Library of America project to take a look at the 2023 International Booker (books translated into English) winner, Bulgarian author Georgi Gospodinov and his novel Time Shelter.  The first thing I did was check my own posts for prior references to Bulgarian literature.  I came up with Elias Canetti, who lived in modern Bulgaria but spoke German (Auto-da-Fé, 1935, 1001 Books Project).  I've got A Ballad for Georg Henig by Victor Paskov (1987), which was included in the 2008 revised 1001 Books Project, replacing a Philip Roth novel (Operation Shylock)- I identify Ballad as the first Bulgarian novel in the 1001 Books project.  Finally there is On the Eve, by Russian author Ivan Turgenev- this book isn't written by a Bulgarian author but the protagonist is a Bulgarian patriot. 

   Time Shelter is mostly an example of the genre of European Philosophical Novel with an interesting science fiction-y twist, but it is most certainly not a work of genre science fiction no matter what marketing materials might claim.  Rather, Time Shelter is an extremely deep and nuanced reflection on the meaning of time and memory in the 21st century- you could also imagine this book being a four hundred page work of philosophy but then it probably would have been translated into English.

  I would not, however, recommend the Audiobook- which I managed to check out immediately without a wait-list AFTER the prize was announced- the Audiobook is not great.

Published 6/9/23

Audiobook Review

The Terraformers (2023)

by Annalee Newitz

   I first read journalist/fiction writer Annalee Newitz back in 2021 when I read her work of non-fiction, Four Lost Cities.  That book was an interesting attempt at the popularization of recent findings supported by the use of LIDAR ground-reading technology which allowed archeologists to see the outlines of buildings buried several feet below the surface.   This has led to a mini-revolution in the study of the collapse of civilizations, which seems to be a central pre-occupation of Newitz in both her fiction and non-fiction work. 

   The review I read of her recent work of speculative fiction, The Terraformers, an at times and at times almost comically dull exploration of the far-future business of planet development, written from the perspective of the broadly defined "people" that populate Newitz's speculative universe, was not positive, or at least not wildly positive, but I went ahead and picked up the Audiobook anyway because this is clearly a work of speculative written from what you might call an alternative viewpoint, and that elevates it above more conventional genre works in the area. 

   Newitz's universe is an interesting blend of hyper-capitalism and the post-scarcity anarchical world of Iain Bank's "The Culture" series.   Parts of The Terraformers are instantly recognizable- the hyper capitalist planet developers speak with a distinct southern accent and the entire book revolves around the for-profit development/terraformers of a "private planet" by a multi-galaxy human led corporation;  other parts are beyond wild: As part of something called the "farm revolution" and the "grand bargain" which apparently takes place in OUR near future, personhood is expanded to all sorts of non-human species.  Humans themselves have subdivided- you've got the traditional homo sapiens- who have evolved into body hopping demigods with access to limitless capital and lifespans of thousands of years.  On the other hand, you've got homo divertis (or something to that effect), which comprises everyone else.   Hardly anyone in this world is born, rather people speak of "being decanted" and the idea of people as property does not raise a collective eyebrow.

   Sentient trains have a disturbingly large place in the narrative as do the "realistic" problems of planet development- which makes parts of The Terraformers read like a New Yorker article written about public transit issues in space.  Personally though I like this book more for that feature- like Newitz has put some thought into her prose.  And if the plot is sometimes pokey, well, there are worse things to be in speculative fiction.

  On the other hand, the story snaps off at novella length, with a non-resolution that is seemingly going for some kind of O'Henry ending ala The Gift of the Magi.