1980's Literature: 1983-1986

 1980's Literature: 1983-1986

     I could actually do plenty with the books in this post.  The first category is books that were on parent's shelf when I grew up- which- in retrospect, must have been a function of my Mom's participation in 80's suburban book club culture.  I can distinctly remember The Unbearable Lightness of Being- I can even visualize the cover of the vintage paperback they owned.  Likewise I can remember the cover of the trade paperback copy of Love in the Time of Cholera.  John Irving was a constant presence- mostly in hardback, though I can't remember Cider House Rules (I do remember the World According to Garp). Next category would be books that influenced my intellectual development and both Less Than Zero and Neuromancer fit neatly into those categories.  I can remember buying a copy of Less Than Zero my freshman year in college at Green Apple Books in San Francisco, and I can remember buying a used paperback copy of Neuromancer in Berkeley.  Third category would be authors I discovered from this time period from the 1001 Books project- Thomas Bernhard, Kazuo Ishiguro and Martin Amis all fit here.  Final category is the passing of authors who were active in this period, and one of the reviews here is from a Joan Didion book I picked up after she passed last year.

Published 12/29/16
Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West (1985)
 by Cormac McCarthy

  I don't often rush home and write a book review, but Blood Meridian is the kind of book that stays with you- for better or worse, depending on your capacity to derive aesthetic satisfaction from a nihilistic western set among a band of Indian scalp hunting American rejects plying their trade in Northern Mexico.  Based on the real life Blanton gang, McCarthy infuses the already incendiary subject matter with an eye to style, scene and theme.   The bleak southwestern landscape receives a treatment at the hands of McCarthy which is 180 degrees from the lionizing landscapes from painters like Georgia O'Keefe and others from the Taos/Santa Fe area.   The simple truth is that the desert southwest is heathen territory, always has been, always will be.  Blanton's gang though, operates outside any conceivable definition of morality, behaving in a rapacious fashion that is so disturbing it probably explains why Blood Meridian has never been made a film.

  For example,  Judge Holden, a quasi-historical member of the Glanton gang, is described as a hairless, seven foot tall man who is able to wield a howitzer like a handgun. He also probably abducts, rapes and murders several young girls, although this is never explicitly confirmed in the text.  It's clear that Holden is an otherwordly, likely demonic presence, and he ends up being one of the more memorable characters of 20th century fiction.

  Ultimately, I would argue that Blood Meridian is a stylistic triumph, with McCarthy's unique combination of Southern Gothic and genre fiction plot mechanics with old testament inspired language.  It is a heady mixture, leaving the reader full satiated at the end of the novel.  Probably my favorite read of the year.

Nobel Prize winning author Doris Lessing, photographed as a young woman.

Published 2/4/17
The Diary of a Good Neighbour (1983)
 by Jane Somers (Doris Lessing)


   If I had to give a short summary of the career of Doris Lessing it would be, "Early success, both critical and popular, followed by a series of head scratching decisions regarding choices surrounding genre and theme, followed by her canonization as a living saint after she won the Nobel Prize in 2001.  It is telling that Lessing never won a Booker Prize, probably because nobody really liked anything she wrote between 1962 (The Golden Notebook) and The Good Terrorist (1985).   Her career, I think, points to the difficulties artists face when they achieve both critical AND popular success- basically obtaining a life time supply of money and artistic credibility over night, typically with the publication of a "hit" work of art.  Since the "hit" really didn't coalese until after the end of World War II, you can't really have this discussion for very many critical/popular successful authors publishing prior to 1950.

  Lessing, who had her first hit with the Grass is Singing IN 1950, is actually perhaps the first of these modern authors and her career is instructive.  The Diary of a Good Neighbour was published as the work of an unknown, new author, name of Jane Somers.  Lessing, of course, was a formidable force in the early 1980's, and her secret authorship was enough to ensure that it received ample critical notice, but did not prove successful either critically or popularly.

    The mystery was "revealed" in 1984, when Lessing published this book and a sequel under her own name as The Diaries of Jane Somers.  She then claimed that she had decided to publish under a pseudonym to make a point about how difficult it was for an unknown author to make a splash, ignoring that Jane Somers received all the support Lessing herself would have received.

   The Diaries of Jane Somers were published around the same time she was writing her five part Canopus series- a sequence of abstruse sufi-inspired science fiction novels which were roundly ignored by critical and popular audiences alike.  Both forays show the struggles of an author trying to change her artistic identity mid career, not because of failure, but because of success.


   The book itself is a marginal 1001 Books participant.  Like the book which represents her Canopus series of science fiction novels, The Diary of a Good Neighbour was culled in 2008.  I firmly agree with the decision.  Jane Somers is a single (widowed), childless urban professional, on the cusp of what you might call a "yuppie."  She works editing a high achieving women's magazine, called Lillith, which sounds like Cosmopolitan mixed with the New Yorker.   Her life begins to change when her best (and only) friend, Joyce- who is also her boss at the magazine- decamps for America, the victim of a failing marriage and leaves her alone.

  She makes a chance connection with a 90 year old woman living by herself nearby,  Maude, and is slowly drawn into her world.  At the same time, she grapples with family issues and work, eventually providing a role model for her sister's daughter and writing a novel which proves successful.  If it sounds like a Hallmark movie, that's because it could be.  At times the writing reminded me of something like Bridget Jones diary- the magazine column, not the film.

  Ultimately, there is great depth to the Maude/Jane relationship, but it is not fun getting there. Unless you actually work with the elderly, the intimate descriptions of cleaning a ninety year old woman with stomach cancer are likely to make you, at the very least, pause.  The subject matter also made me question why Doris Lessing wouldn't want to publish this dark, serious, very literary material under her own name.  It's not like The Diary of a Good Neighbour is a romance novel, and she had already published more-or-less straight genre science fiction under her own name.

Isabelle Huppert gave a memorable performance as the title character in the movie version of the The Piano Teacher, released in 2001;

Published 2/9/17
The Piano Teacher (1983)
by Elfriede Jelinek

  I am familiar with the movie version, memorably starring Isabelle Huppert and directed by Michael Haneke (2001).  The movie is compelling stuff, a twisted pyscho sexual "thriller" as that word applies to a French art film.   The book I found less emotionally compelling, but more interesting intellectually.    I'm not a big fan of BDSM, but I'm not frightened by it either.  My position is that it's a normal part of the range of human sexuality, perhaps not as benign as the LGBTQ rainbow of affiliations, but a step above outright reprehensible expressions of sexuality like pedophilia or bestiality.   The difference is the presence of consent on the part of both partners.  It's also, to me, the most interesting part of the BDSM world, the contractual nature of it all.

  If you are unfamiliar with the BDSM world, BDSM is more then just restraints, whips and chains (though indeed those props figure in the plot of The Piano Teacher.)  The more involved areas of the BDSM world typically involve written contracts with explicit language concerning the rights and responsibilities of the parties concern.  The contracts, of course, regard agreements of the sort where one party is essentially voluntarily enslaved by the other, usually with the explicit purpose of sexual gratification on the part of the both parties.

  In the professional BDSM world, professional dominatrix's are often called "Mistresses," and it reflects the common posture of a woman dominating a man, and being paid for it.   The Piano Teacher, set in Vienna in the mid 1970's, is a world away from the contemporary world of BDSM, but as the birthplace of Freudianism, it is a place very much at the center of BDSM culture.   Much of the theory and practice that underlays this area of human sexuality was formed explicitly either following or opposed to classic Freudian theory regarding the relationship between families, sexual pleasure and death obsession.  This trilogy is also a good summation of the themes of The Piano Teacher, about a soon-to-be spinster who lives with her domineering mother in a small Viennnese apartment, with the daughter supporting both with her work as a piano teacher.

  Freudian motifs dominate The Piano Teacher from start to finish: unfulfilled ambitions, troubled familial relationships, an obsession with the obliteration of the self through self destructive activity, The Piano Teacher is a panoply of neuroses. 

Ali Bhutto appears as Iskander Harappa in Shame, the 1983 novel by Salman Rushdie.

Published 2/9/17
Shame (1983)
 by Salman Rushdie

  You don't have to know about the history of Pakistan, but it helps, because Shame, Rushdie's third novel, is a magically realistic take on the tragic friendship between Zulifkar Ali Bhutto (Iskander Harappa) and General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq (General Raza Hyder).  As recounted in The Struggle for Pakistan by Ayesha Jalal (2014),  these two figures ran Pakistan successively between 1971 and 1988.  Bhutto was the cosmopolitan playboy who championed "Islamic Socialism" and Zia, as he was known, was responsible for creating Pakistan as an Islamic Republic.

  Like The House of Spirits, another work of magical realism published in the early 1980's featuring a fictionalized take on the troubled 20th century history of a small Latin American nation (Chile), Shame has a heavy dose of realism- dark realism- mixed in with the by now familiar bag of magical tricks to spice up the grim reality of 20th century Pakistani history.    Anyone who has read both Midnight's Children, his 1981 break out hit, and Shame is likely to spot continuities and similarities.  Rushdie's confidence as an author is on full display in Shame, with several interludes by the narrator revealing that he (the narrator) is either Rushdie himself or someone so close to Rushdie and his life experience as to make the difference negligible

  It's difficult to see Shame as anything other then a kind of second chapter of Midnight's Children, and it's fair to say that there is nothing wrong with that, when one considers how intoxicating Rushdie's brand of magic realism proved after that novel was published.  But Rushdie doesn't break any new thematic ground in Shame, and if you consider that The House of the Spirits was published just the year before, it might be fair to ask whether the tenets of magical realism were already becoming cliche when Shame was published in 1983.

Published 2/10/17
Fools of Fortune
 by William Trevor

  I feel like the Anglo Irish aristocracy is dramatically over-represented in the original 1001 Books list.  Even granting Irish status as the first "colonial" environment and the attendant proposition that Ireland was also the location of the first "post-colonial" literature, the Anglo Irish (as supposed to the Irish themselves) were at best a highly parasitic bunch of land barons.  That they produced excellent novelists is no surprise, since they were both wealthy enough to have the time, energy and education to write and they were also semi-despised outsiders who were ultimately largely expelled.

  Still, when you compare the 20th century Irish colonial experience to places in Africa and Asia, the Irish tend to come bottom of the table. Consider that as of 1983, the 1001 Books list has not a single book by a Chinese speaking author and the first novel on the list ABOUT China is Empire of the Sun, by J.G. Ballard.   Meanwhile, I count as many as 15 novels on the original 1001 Books list that come from Anglo Irish writers.   I'm not counting the books of IRISH authors like James Joyce and Samuel Beckett.

 Fools of Fortune is such a late example of the Anglo Irish experience that it almost reads as an exercise in historical fiction.  He traces the fortunes of a very liberal Anglo Irish family through the story of Louis, a child at the beginning of the book.  His family owns a mill, but is relatively unique in that the father and family going back two generations are supporters of Irish independence, to the point where the Grandfather had given away his ancestral estate to the farmers- a highly unusual act.

     The action picks up during the time of "the troubles" during and after World War I, where a sometimes brutal war of independence was waged and the English behaved, and were treated like, an occupying army.  Louis' father learns this the hard way, when he is murdered by a "Black and Tan" in reprisal for his support for the Irish independence movement, embodied by Michael Collins, who appears in Fools of Fortune as a minor character.

      The murder of Louis' father at the hands of the English occupying forces sets in motion a series of events one might expect from a 20th century novel, leavened somewhat by a love story between Louis and his English cousin, Marianne. What seems to be a highly Louis centered narrative suddenly switches half way through, as we learn about events from the eyes of Marianne, Louis' beloved.

Published 2/11/17
Worstward Ho (1983)
 by Samuel Beckett

    Samuel Beckett won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969, and he didn't die until 1989, giving him two decades to exist as a veritable literary saint on earth.  Samuel Beckett is a colossus of 20th century literature and drama.  He has a direct link to James Joyce, the high priest of high modernism, and his own work represents a bridge between the modern and post-modern,   He also was a key avatar in the linguistic turn as it manifested itself both in literature and academia.  Finally, he is an apostle of minimalism, a movement that continues to inform large swaths of varied artistic disciplines.

   At the same time, he was never a huge popular figure.  In popular culture, most people don't know who he is, and if they do, he's vaguely associated with the play, Waiting for Godot- two guys waiting for a person who never arrives.  In popular culture, Beckett is a Simpsons reference.   You would expect Samuel Beckett, who died in 1989, to on a cusp of a revival- 30 years from death represents a generational opportunity to revive the titles of an Author and introduce them to a totally new generation, one who need to purchase copies of the author's titles.

  Among the critical/serious/academic class, Beckett is a saint and participation in that culture requires knowledge of his career high-points, but it's not like he is a hot topic on campus.  Beckett is a given.  He's been a given for a generation.  He was a given in the Bay Area in the early 1990's, where I took a girl on a first date to a Berkeley Repertory Theater production of Waiting for Godot.   Amazingly, that title doesn't make the 1001 Books list, probably because all plays- from Shakespeare onward are excluded from the 1001 Books definition of a "book."   Even without Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett is a key figure in the 1001 Books list, with Worstward Ho the last of his eight titles.

  Murphy, his first title on the 1001 Books list, was published in 1938, giving his included titles a date range of 45 years!  My recommendation, having now read all eight books on the list, is to focus on early Beckett.  Of middle and later Beckett, it can be summarized as "difficult to understand."  Unless you have some vested interest in understanding Samuel Beckett, it's his early novels- Murphy and Malloy, specifically which are the only books that are likely to bring the casual reader something like pleasure.

  It's impossible to pass from the topic of Samuel Beckett without addressing existentialism, an attitude which his entire oeuvre exudes.  Existentialism suffuses much of art after World War II, but Becektt is one of the few artists whose work fully anticipated existentialism before it existed. The idea of the meaningless of existence animates all of his work, and there is some irony in the fact that a man so obsessed with emptiness could create work which has proved to be so full of meaning.

Published 2/13/17
Waterland (1983)
by Graham Swift

  Waterland is an inventive novel that manages to make a palette of seemingly unpromising locales and themes into something more than the sum of its parts.   Loosely speaking, Waterland is a work of historical fiction or historical meta-fiction, centered around the history of an area of the East Anglia Fens/Wetlands.  Tom Crick, the narrator, is a history teacher on the edge of (forced) retirement. He is told by the headmaster that history is being phased out as a separate department, and almost simultaneously his wife is arrested for attempting to steal a baby.  These events spur a series of recollections about his personal history and the history of Waterland, which he in turn describes to his class of high school students, a last act of defiance that forms most of the "action" of the present time of the plot.

  Wikipedia identifies Waterland as strongly affiliated with "New Historicism," which was a cross-discipline movement to use literature to illuminate history and vice versa.  Waterland achieves both those goals, seemingly effortlessly, while keeping Waterland well within the heartland of the tradition of English fiction, with sex, death and madness along for the ride.   There is a familiarity about the themes and events of Waterland that serve to mask the theory behind, the literary equivalent of a spoonful of sugar to make the medicine go down.

  In 1983 the meta-historical novel barely existed, and it is easy to see why this early example found such a receptive audience,

Published 2/13/17
The Sorrow of Belgium (1983)
by Hugo Claus

   It is both easy and accurate to describe The Sorrow of Belgium as a "Flemish  The Tin Drum."  Whether that description means anything depends on how familiar you are with the Flemish and The Tin Drum, respectively.  The Flemish are a Dutch speaking minority in the modern nation of Belgium, where the French speaking Walloons (and Flemish who emulate Walloons by speaking French) is dominant, and the Flemish, while not exactly oppressed, are not at the top of the pyramid.

  Thus, for Louis, the narrator, and son of a middle class Flemish household in the time before World War II, the rise of Hitler is viewed with excitement.  The Flemish were part of the greater Germanic nation (a group which also included the Eastern Germans of The Tin Drum) and they benefited from the German occupation, economically and socially.   The pro and anti German locals of the Flemish part of Belgium were known by the color of their shirts, Black shirts for pro, White for anti.  Louis, mirroring his family line, is pro-Germany, and he goes so far as to enroll (and then dis-enroll) in the local analogue of the Hitler Youth (called the VNV. )

  I didn't particularly enjoy reading a 700 page memoir from a Flemish Hitler Youth, but I suppose The Sorrow of Belgium is proof of the enduring appeal of the European realist novel well into the 20th century.  The Sorrow of Belgium wasn't even published in English until 1990 which brings the publication history almost up to present day.   Like The Tin Drum, there is insight to be had from those on the periphery of World War II- first of all, they weren't wiped out like the more affected groups, and second they maintained some distance from the center of the maelstrom created by Hitler and the National Socialist.

  It is interesting reading about how the local Dutch speaking Belgian minority debated the rise of National Socialism as it related to their own quasi-nationalist leanings.  Other than that, there is a limit, a personal limit, when it comes to pro-Nazi memoirs, even if narrated by children.

Published 2/14/17
Flaubert's Parrot (1984)
 by Julian Barnes

   You could argue that Julian Barnes, with only one novel on the 1001 Books list, is underrepresented.  He's been Booker Prize shortlisted three times, including for Flaubert's Parrot, and he won in 2011 for The Sense of An Ending, not included on the 1001 Books list.  Flaubert's Parrot is a little slip of a book, not 200 pages all in.  It has a structure that flows back and forth between subjects related to the narrator's quest for a stuffed parrot said to have inspired author Gustave Flaubert and subjects related to his own personal life.  The book is simultaneously "about" the narrator and his life, and different interpretations of the life of Flaubert.

  Narrator Geofrrey Braithwaite is a retired Doctor, widowed, English, tracing the foot steps of author Gustave Flaubert at various locations in France.  As you might expect from a narrator who is obsessed with Gustave Flaubert, Braithwaite has opinions about literature, and he shares those thoughts with the reader.  This commentary on literature (Example- Braithwaite would ban novels that contain incest as a plot point) creates one of the first memorable "meta" moments in literature.  Emphasis on the "memorable."   One of the major. mainstream events of the 1980's was the introduction of humor into post-modern books, and an attendant widening of the audience for works that contain dense, self contained arguments between the narrator and a long-dead English critic about the attention that Flaubert paid to his description to the color of Emma's eye in Madame Bovary.

  Flaubert's Parrot, alongside Waterland, represents a flowering of the type of literature I would equate with my personal taste- starting in the 1970's but really coming into form by the mid 1980's and beyond, up through the publication of Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, in 1996.  It's a vast flourishing of literature that encompasses specialist-only areas of knowledge and embraces footnotes and other accouterments of twentieth century graduate student life.

Martin Amis: Money A Suicide Note

Published 2/24/17
Money: A Suicide Note (1984)
 by Martin Amis

  I was really looking forward to reading Money: A Suicide Note and I am pleased to report that it was not disappoint.  Indeed, you could argue that it is just as relevant in the era of Trump as it was in the era of Reagan.  It's the story of John Self, a cockney made good in the world of advertising, who has abandoned his craft in an attempt to film "his story" which is called both Good Money and Bad Money at various points.  He is assisted by a breezy "20 something" film producer, Fielding Goodney (played by Pete Campbell from Mad Men in the BBC version).  Back and forth he goes between London and United States, his rapidly deteriorating mental and physical health tracking the state of his film production.

  Although it was the style of Money: A Suicide Note which engaged me: brusque, masculine, lurid, Amis also knows how to put together a plot, and the denouement comes as a startling surprise. Money: A Suicide Note also contains meta-fictional tricks like including the author as a character (brought in to rewrite the original script for the film.)  John Self is a memorable character, sympathetic despite the fact that he is a confirmed woman beater, alcoholic, whore monger and of course, successful ad executive, all of which would seem to make him the opposite of sympathetic, but then, that is a testament to his skill as a writer.

Illustration of the Wasp Factory itself from the novel The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks

Published 2/25/17
The Wasp Factory(1984)
by Iain Banks

  The Wasp Factory, the debut novel for Scottish writer Iain Banks, is a nasty little bit of work; the novel equivalent of a bare-bones noir which introduces the world to a talented film maker.  There is much to like in The Wasp Factory, and just as much to hate, certainly just as much to offend.  Like many early works by notable British authors in the 1980's and 1970's, The Wasp Factory combines sensible, economical prose with thematic concerns that border on the grotesque, with a heavy dose of the gothic and macabre.

  Set on a remote Scottish island, The Wasp Factory is told from the perspective of a psychopathic teenager, living alone with his aloof father.  Frances(the narrator) calmly discloses to readers that he has already murdered three people- including his brother and a female cousin- before he hit puberty.  He professes to have left that behind as a "stage" and he now contents himself by wandering the island and murdering animals in creative ways.

  The Wasp Factory of the title is a mechanism Frances constructs out of an abandoned clock face, which gives captures wasps 12 different ways to die.  The major action concerns the escape of Frances' more floridly psychopathic older brother Eric from a local insane asylum.  It's hard to discuss much more without at least hinting at the plot twist which appears at the end of the book. Banks went on to make his name as a science fiction writer, and received much critical and popular acclaim in that world (Elon Musk has named several space related projects after starships in his sci fi books.)

Published 2/25/17
Empire of the Sun (1984)
by J.G. Ballard

  Empire of the Sun is a fictionalized version of Ballard's actual experience in World War II, as a child separated from his parents at the beginning of World War II in China.  Captured by the Japanese, he is confined to a prison camp outside of Shanghai where he probably had the mildest experience of being interned in a Japanese prison camp of anyone.   He probably benefited from being close to Shanghai. If you read other depictions of life in a World War II Japanese prison camp, like say, the ones in A Town Like Alice,  the camp in Empire of the Sun sounds like a summer camp.

  There is no doubt that Empire of the Sun is a ripping yarn and a compelling narrative.  It's hard to say much more than that.

Published 2/27/17
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984)
by Milan Kundera


   A minor theme of this blog in recent years is the strain of philosophical-existentialism which manifested itself in many notable examples of "European" literature in the 1970's and 1980's.  This aesthetic trend had a particular home in Soviet and post-Soviet Eastern Europe, with the two most notable elaborations occurring in Poland (cinema) and then Czechoslovakia, now Czech Republic (cinema and literature.)  The literature from this period generally eschewed the trend towards "magic realism" that was happening in the rest of the literary world for a style that was closer to the philosophical-existentialist French novel of the 1950's.

  I would argue that Milan Kundera's contribution was the incorporation of explicit sex into the dour lives of his Central European intellectuals.  The Unbearable Lightness of Being is built around one of the central social programs of 20th century Communism:  Taking loyal community members and stripping them of their positions and status because of some imagined ideological purity.  Here, the victim is Tomas, a surgeon, who is called to account for a letter to the editor/editorial he has written some years earlier.  Tomas has both a wife and a lover.  Also his lover has a lover.  It is all very French, except for the fact that it is Czech.  The Unbearable Lightness of Being was actually published in French before it was published in Czech, and Kundera has argued that his work should be considered French literature.

Published 3/1/17

Neuromancer (1984)
 by William Gibson

   Fact I didn't know about Neuromancer, the 1984 "cyber punk" trailblazer by William Gibson: It was the first novel to win the "triple crown" of science fiction: Nebula, Hugo and Phillip K Dick awards.  It is typically credited with coining the term "cyberpunk" itself, though that actually happened two years prior in another William Gibson title, Burning Chrome.   You can make the argument, and support it by Gibson's own statements on the subject, that Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982) actually was the first work to describe the cyber punk world, but that was a film version of an earlier science fiction story that itself lacked the certain something which Gibson brings to the table in Neuromancer.

  The plot of Neuromancer is straight forward, pedestrian even, the story of a disgraced hacker who is brought back for "one last heist."   Everything else about it is hard to follow, and only the accumulated familiarity with the world Gibson describes makes reading Neuromancer any less disorienting than it was when it was originally published. 

Published 3/3/17
Blood and Guts in High School (1984)
by Kathy Acker

   Kathy Acker was a Post Modern (capital P capital M) author and performance artist, closely affiliated with the literary scene surrounding the punk movement in 1970's and 1980's New York.  Her works are heavily influenced by the experimental writing techniques of William Burroughs, and her themes reflect feminist, gender theory and queer theory of the 1960's and 70's.  If you went to an American university in the 1990's, you probably ran across her books in one form another.  Since then, I'm not sure what's happened to her relevance, but her pastiche/cut up/punk aesthetic and post-2nd wave feminist queer politics seem particularly apropos for what you might call the "Tumblr Aesthetic."

  Blood and Guts in High School is her break-through work, probably because it actually resembles a novel in form, even with her lengthy digressions in the form of line drawings and sourced materials.  Her heroine, Janey Smith is a ten year old nymphomaniac and long-time sufferer of vaginal health issues that hardly inhibit her precocious sexual activity.

  It's hard to know what to make of Blood and Guts in High School.  I chose to read it as a parody of a 18th or 19th century bildungsroman/coming of age novel that was particularly concerned with the sexual exploitation of young woman in contemporary society.  However, that reading requires that we credit Acker with some kind of humorous intent in her writing, and considering the horrific travails of Smith as an incest victim and teenager forced into prostitution (by a "Persian slave trader," no less.) it seems inappropriate to call Blood and Guts in High School either intentionally OR unintentionally funny.  It is shocking, still.

Published 3/5/17
Hawksmoor (1985)
by Peter Ackroyd

  Author Peter Ackroyd is the kind of writer who is so successful and prolific that one suspects him of having a staff of unrecognized assistants who crank the stuff out for him.  His fame doesn't quite span the Atlantic ocean.   I'm familiar with his non-fiction works about the city of London and the work of Charles Dickens, but I was surprised to learn that his output is nearly as prolific in the world of fiction.

  And, I'm not quite sure how to say this politely, but Ackroyd seems to turned into a bit of a hack in his old age.  Example:  Between 1999 and 2010, he published seven novels, all of which had titles which started with the word "The."  Perhaps that isn't conclusive proof that an author has become a hack, but I would say it does serve as a proper supporting exhibit to support that proposition.   Ackroyd, I would imagine, is a victim of success and his later day decline shouldn't obscure what got him to the top in the first place: Several excellent works of non-fiction about the area of London and it's inhabitants, and Hawksmoor, his excellent novel of "meta-historical" fiction about the construction of several 18th century churches and some modern murders which take place in those same churches.

  Ackroyd alternates his narration between that of 18th century architect Nicholas Dyer (also some sort of satanist) and several modern narrators, including the police detective, Nicholas Hawksmoor. It should go, almost without saying, that in any work of fiction by Ackroyd, London plays a starring role.   That is the case with Hawksmoor, where Ackroyd alternates his descriptions of the 18th century, post-fire London of Nicholas Dyer with modern London.

  The chapter narrated by 18th century architect-satanist Nicolas Dyer are written in the style of 18th century fiction, with unfamiliar diction and capitalization.  The spelling and orthography are standardized, but even if you are familiar with the style of 18th century prose fiction, Dyer is likely to keep you gasping for air. 

Published 3/5/17
The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis (1984)
 by Jose Saramago

  Like many other non-English language authors in the 1001 Books list, Saramago really nailed down his English language audience with a Nobel Prize for Literature win, in 1998.   Before then he was obviously highly regarded, but not an instant success- The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis wasn't published in English translation until 1991.   I've read that Saramago is often grouped as a magical realist, but The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis is heavy on the realism and contains no magic whatsoever.  Rather, The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis is about the man in the title, a Brazilian doctor of Portuguese citizenship, who returns home to Lisbon, 16 years after his departure, with Europe on the cusp of World War II.

  Portugal at the time had already established it's own authoritarian government, headed by Antonio Salazar.  Salazar was pro-Franco, even before Franco existed, and he was able to keep Portugal neutral during the Second World War.  Ricardo Reis does very little during the year of his death.  He seduces a char woman and woos a young woman from an upper class family.  He takes long walks, fills in for another doctor who is sick, and reads the newspaper, from which he learns of the events sending Europe spiraling towards the Second World War.   The only "action" in The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis is a scene where he is gently interrogated by the Portuguese police.   Also, he knocks up the charwoman, but that is about it.

  My favorite portions of this book were Saramago's description of the char woman cleaning Reis' apartment and then falling into his arms for bouts of passionate love making, a circumstance which reminded me of the Seinfeld episode where Jerry starts sleeping with a woman he met while she was cleaning his apartment.

Published 3/6/17
Dictionary of the Khazars (1984)
 by  Milorad Pavić

  Producing a novel by blending source materials which combine facts with fiction to create a fictitious narrative of real history has become a well-established rode to both critical and popular success.   Most recently, this vibrant genre has been highlighted by English author Hilary Mantel, who became the first woman to win the Booker Prize twice, both for works which fit within this description. Dictionary of the Khazars was an early success in this area, the work of Serbian author and Nobel Prize for Literature-also ran Milorad Pavic.   His success with Dictionary of the Khazars is attributable both to the book itself and for the market in fiction translated into English.  The development of popular and critical audience for fiction translated into English is as old as those audiences themselves, but certainly the sprawling international publishing industry of the 1980's and 1990's, together with similarly international film studios, elevated the area of translated fiction from a backwater to a major player at the intersection of popular and serious fiction.

 Dictionary of the Khazars revolves around the historical but poorly understood Khazar polity of the early middle ages.  Located on the plains north of the Black Sea, their leader famously converted to Judaism for reasons which remain obscure.   Dictionary of the Khazars takes the form of three overlapping but conflicting encyclopedias referencing the (fictional) historical event of the Khazar Polemics, where a Christian, Muslim and Jewish wise man debated the interpreted a dream for the leader of the Khazars. with the winner being allowed to convert the entire Khazar people.

  Not surprisingly, the three different encyclopedia's differ substantially, beginning with each claiming victory for their particularly faith and obscuring the existence of the other participants in the Khazar polemic.  Certain figures, notably the Princess Ateh, recur, others are specific to one of the three books.  Pavic provides academic annotation in the true style of high post-modernism, to the point where historically attested "fact" are interchangeable with authorial created fiction.

  Certain descriptions extend into the procedurally generated fantastic realism of Italo Calvino.  Particularly, some of the broader descriptions of "Khazar" society echo certain portions of Calvino's Invisible Cities (1972).

Published 3/11/17
Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (1985)
 by Patrick Susskind

       Perfume: The Story of a Murderer is what you call an international hit, written in German, set in 18th century France with an entirely French speaking cast of characters, and made into a feature film by Dreamworks, directed by Tom Tykwer (Run Lola Run).  Unfortunately, the last and most important piece of that combination- the film by Dreamworks, was a huge bomb, and so Perfume: The Story of a Murderer has been denied the kind of eternal after life claimed by books made into hit films like the English Patient or Remains of the Day.

    Jean-Baptiste Grenouille is a foundling, abandoned in 18th century Paris by a mother who is quickly executed for the infanticide of Jean's older siblings.  He is raised in a tannery, where he survives against all odds and comes into possession of his greatest gift, a preternatural sense of smell.  He escapes the tannery for an apprenticeship with a declining Parisian Perfumery, and the story really takes off from there.  Oh- and also- Grenouille is also a murderer, fond of strangling nubile red heads.

  You can't be accused of revealing that fact- since the novel does in the subtitle. The story is compelling enough, with a twist at the end, but the real attractions are the portions describing the 18th century perfume industry in France.  Personally, I found this description more compelling than the story of Juan-Baptiste Grenouille, who, after all, is a murderer, and hardly a wit besides that.
  

Published 3/13/17
LaBrava (1983)
 by Elmore Leonard

  Is Elmore Leonard genre fiction or literature: discuss.  On the one hand, Leonard was published in a manner consistent with the conventions of genre fiction: gaudy neon cover paperback books with his name splashed above the title, high budget Hollywood adaptations starring John Travolta.   On the other hand, he only died in 2013, and any author with a huge popular audience and debatable literary merit is going to have to wait until after death to obtain a fear hearing by critical audiences   Leonard is distinguishable from other genre writers in that he does possess a serious literary following, and that it is at least a 50/50 bet that anyone who considers the question closely is likly to agree, in 2017, that Elmore Leonard is the canonical writer of detective fiction in the US during the period when he was writing.

  If you are someone seriously considering Elmore Leonard as a canonical writer, it's worth taking a look at his work in the form of a Google timeline (if you search his name in Google and then arrange his works in chronological order, you will see what I'm talking about.)  He started out as a writer of Western Fiction- including the recently filmed version of 3:10 To Yuma.  

 Then he went into his first canonical period, when he was writing Detroit area Police procedural/Detective Fiction. This period is represented in the 1001 Books list by City Primeval (1980).  Leonard's fiction followed his own travels, and LaBrava represents the start of his second period- which is more thematically sophisticated.  Leonard never abandoned Detroit- you can consider the 1999 novel Out of Sight, which was made into a well received film by Steven Soderbergh.

  I would argue that Leonard's canonical status ultimately rests on his merit as a "Florida" author, and that Florida is a culture that deserves the most sophisticated level of literary treatment.  Elmore Leonard's Florida noir isn't quite that- he never was seriously considered for major literary prizes during his lifetime, which complicates any posthumous rehabilitation.  I mean, Leonard got a "career achievement" award from the National Book Award a year before he died. 

White Bearded Man, by Jacobo Tinoretto, from the  Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna

Published 3/14/17
Old Masters (1985)
 by Thomas Bernhard

   After reading one book by Thomas Bernhard, you largely know what to expect from the others:  A narrator who 1) hates and misunderstands humanity 2) is obsessed with some sort of intellectual pursuit with no real world value 3) hates Austria and Austrian culture.   So obsessed, misanthropic characters are Bernhard's stock in trade, and it is no wonder that he has managed to establish an international reputation, because, really, he's talking about serious readers.

  Authors and novels which obliquely (or overtly) critique the culture of seirous readers are to the novel what knowing books about the movie industry are to Hollywood: popular enough with intensive consumers of the resulting cultural product to establish a distinct creative space, but not something that extends out into the wider world of the general, popular, audience.   Put another way, Bernhard might be described as an "authors author."   I think his nearest American analog would be Nicholson Baker but there is no doubt that the intensity of his hatred for modern life marks him apart, and that extremity is, again, probably why he has successfully found an international audience for his German language fiction.

  Old Masters concerns two old men, Atzbacher and Reger, who have spent five hours, every other day for 30 years (Reger has, anyway) sitting in front of White Bearded Man, a painting by Italian artist Jacobo Tinoretto that is displayed in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.   Atzbacher narrates Old Masters, which largely consists of Atzbacher remembering important events from Reger's life, notably the death of his wife.  Interspersed with those musings are lengthy fulminations against "the modern state"  and the "state sponsored artist." Both elements are well developed, as you would expect from Bernhard, but I found his material about the role of the state and the state-artist to be particularly clever.  It's not a foreign subject for him.  For example, Wittgenstein's Nephew considers a lengthy chapter involving the Bernhard/narrator figure disastrously receiving a state sponsored artistic prize, insulting the audience in his acceptance speech and causing the austrian arts minister to go storming out of the building.

Naked Charlize Theron playing Candy in the movie version of The Cider House Rules

Published 3/14/17
The Cider House Rules (1985)
 by John Irving

   Reading John Irving is fine enough, but like his mentor Kurt Vonnegut, I don't trust him- his sentiment or his prose.  I'm sure his presence in the 1001 Books list stems from his ability to achieved critical and popular success while grappling with the sort of tough themes that are often absent from popular fiction, but in the end, it all seems too calculated and upbeat to really ascend to the upper echelons of the literary canon.

  Case in point is The Cider House Rules, a well received best-seller, adapted by the author himself into a big budget Miramax production (starring Tobey Maguire at his hottest, a young Charlize Theron and Paul Rudd, of all people.)  The film itself was successful, nominated for seven Oscars in 1999 and winning two (best adapted screenplay, best supporting actor Michael Caine.)  I'm not saying that middle-brow fiction can't also be high art, but I am saying that John Irving, serious themes aside, is inescapably middle brow, and that his books aren't first-rate works of literature.

  To take one example, there is the incest sub-plot of The Cider House Rules, which comes as part of the otherwise strong third act.  The victim is the African-American daughter of the African-American foreman of an apple picking crew that handles work at the Apple farm where most of the action takes place.   It bother me that Irving, writing in 1985, thought it was cool to use African American character to enact an incest driven plot point in a book set almost entirely in rural Maine.  Is that John Irving's story to tell?  No it is not.  He doesn't do a good job telling it, and it ends up making his African American characters seem less human.

  The same could be said for many of Vonnegut's characters, that they are simply transparent vehicles for the author's high-falutin' ideas about humanity.  And I suppose you could make the same claim for every successful author, but not really, since so often what we respond to in fiction are finely drawn characters who draw us into their world.  The Cider House Rules is about abortion as much as it is about anything, so get ready of 560 pages of opinions about abortion from an old white guy.  That he is sympathetic does little to disguise what to me read as really tone-deaf takes on the abortion experience.

Published 3/17/17
A Maggot (1985)
by John Fowles


 John Fowles really ticks all the boxes of  post modern fiction with broad commercial appeal.  In A Maggot, he brings his bag of post-modernist tricks and applies them to a faux-historical tale, set in the 18th century.  A Maggot pieces together the circumstances behind a mysterious hanging of a servant in remote Western England (near the Welsh border.)  Fowles explicitly places the events in the 18th century, going so far to include faux news broadsheets in between chapters.   The novel itself largely consists of "legal documents" drawn up during the investigation of the mysterious death that opens the novel.  Of course, this is a method of constructing a novel that did not exist in the 19th century, let alone the 18th century, and any versed reader will immediately recognize the "18th century" sounding dialogue as being closer to what you would find in a 19th century novel.  A casual reader, unfamiliar with the difference between 18th and 19th century in English literature, would of course not notice the difference.

   Without dispensing spoilers, Fowles include plot details which span 18th century gothic fiction, 19th century "supernatural" fiction a la Wilkie Collins and Edgar Allan Poe, and 20th century speculative fiction.  This material is integrated with the aggregated legal documents so that the reader is left to speculate or look up on Wikipedia what actually happens.

  I was dismissive of the challenge that A Maggot presents to a casual reader (as one might reasonably expect to be when reading a John Fowles novel), but the combination of the pieced together, pastiche narrative technique and a layer of symbolic as well as a meta-symbolic level of narrative proved confusing when I tried to read A Maggot during the opening nights of March Madness.   I can't get into what about A Maggot I actually fully missed while reading it without spoiling major plot developments, but it's significant to understanding both the symbolic and meta-symbolic interpretations.

  Do I give a shit that I missed something in a John Fowles novel? No. John Fowles is, above all, a fun author, easy to read.  Maybe complicated to fully understand because of all the meta-fictional asshattery, but easy to read.  A Maggot is NOT easy to read, even if you are comfortable with 18th and 19th century fiction.   You could call it tedious.  There can be not surprise that A Maggot was one of two (out of four) titles dropped in the first revision of the 1001 Books list.  You could make the argument that he only deserves one: The French Lieutenant's Woman or The Magus, pick one.

Published 3/20/17
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985)
 by Jeanette Winterson

  "Flannery O'Connor if she was a Evangelical Pentecostal from the English Midlands;" is as apt a description as I can imagine for Jeanette Winterson's lesbian coming-of-age novel.  The comparison doesn't track all the way to the station: O'Connor didn't write about herself, and Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit is about as thinly veiled fiction as I can imagine,  Winterson was actually raised by Evangelical Pentecostal's in the English Midlands (she was adopted.)

  Her coming of age novel has a mix of familiar LGBTQ tropes (now, not in 1985) and outre behavior from Winterson's adoptive Mother, a highly religious woman equally devoted to judging others and her adoptive daughter.  Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit eschews explicit sex, and doesn't contain anything beyond explicit descriptions of hell-fire to trouble sensitive souls.

  Alas, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit was a victim of the initial 2008 revision of the 1001 Books list, making Winterson not just a one hit wonder, but also a one and done, for the purposes of the 1001 Books project.

Jody Foster played Dr. Eleanor Arroway in the movie version of Contact by Carl Sagan.

Published 3/20/17
Contact (1985)
by Carl Sagan

    Is it possible that Contact, the achingly dull science fiction classic by Carl Sagan, is not just a charter member of the 1001 Books list but also a core title, one that has not been removed at any point?  Yes.  It is more than possible, it is a true fact.   I will grant that it has maintained it's relevant- just take a look at two recent "serious" science fiction films with the same theme: Arrival, starring Amy Adams, and Interstellar, with Matthew McConaughey.   Both films echo important parts of Contact so concretely that it almost seems like an "inspired by" would be required for both films.

   At the same time, it's not exactly a book that people really read anymore.  The Jody Foster starring film version in the 1990's gave it a bump, but as of 2017 Contact, with it's Cold War milieu and pre-Internet technology, seems more like alternate history a la Man in the High Castle than science fiction.

   For those unfamiliar with the basic premise, the Jody Foster character is an astronomer working on the SETI (Search for extraterrestrial intelligence) project when a message is detected.  Much of the novel involves decoding the message, followed by the construction of a machine specified by the decoded message.  As the title promises, Contact ensues, though it is the kind of anti-climax that one might expect from the real world, not science fiction.

   Like many notable science fiction authors, Sagan is no prose stylist. Even judge by those standards, the resulting pages, especially the exposition heavy conversational dialog.  Sagan's obsession with the relationship between science and religion is understandable, but it doesn't make for compelling fiction, in my opinion.   I suppose you could argue that Sagan earns his place by authoring the first "Hard" Science Fiction, a genre which has increasingly led the charge for genre fiction to be taken seriously as literature, or at least as a major inspiration for scientific and popular culture. 

Published 3/25/17
Love in the Time of Cholera (1985)
by Gabriela Garcia Marquez

  Those looking for another classic falling under the description of "magical realism" are sure to be disappointed with Love in the Time of Cholera, one of Garcia-Marquez's post Nobel Prize for Literature winning efforts.  What it must be like to win the Nobel Prize in the middle of one's literary career.  Of course, the Nobel Prize for Literature can't be awarded posthumously, so every recipient is living and in some way benefits from the win, but Marquez really sealed his reputation as an international author of the first rank

  More-or-less explictly set in his native Columbia, Love in the Time of Cholera is a more personal work than One Hundred Years of Solitude.  One Hundred Years of Solitude maintains a quasi-mythic tone (one which became synonymous with magical realism) which is largely absent from Cholera. Although Cholera is set almost entirely in the 20th century, the major characters have attitudes which seem drawn from the prior centuries of literature, specifcally the 18th century idea of "sensibility" and 19th century ideas about romanticism. Florentino Ariza, Marquez's hear sick protagonist, is both hero and villain, not in the sense of an "anti-hero" but in the sense of someone who does good and bad.

  Cholera is very much about romantic love, and concerns itself largely of the impact of romantic love unrequited.  

Published 3/26/17
reasons to live (1985)
 by Amy Hempel

  Amy Hempel is a literary minimalist, or you might say a miniaturist, her books of short "stories" has several episodes that are under a page in length, and I don't think any of them have more than a dozen pages tops.   Her "stories" chronicle the dissipated Los Angeles area coastal lifestyle in the late 1970's and early 1980's.   She is often compared to Raymond Carver (who I always confuse with Raymond Chandler ha ha), in terms of the quietness of the lives she depicts.
 

   Once again, I found myself in total ignorance of an author who chronicles the very area I call home.  Where has Amy Hempel been hiding my entire life? Why have I never seen or heard of anyone else reading her books?  Why have I never seen an article in a newspaper or online about her?  

Published 3/29/17
Foe (1986)
 by J.M. Coeteze

   Color me not surprised that Foe, Coeteze's mid 1980's riff on Robinson Crusoe and father-of-the-novel Daniel DeFoe did not survive the cull between the first and second(2008) edition of the 1001 Books list.  First of all, Coeteze, Nobel Prize for Literature winning author or not, is hugely over-represented on the first edition of the list, with ten qualifying titles.  That is too many for any single author, let alone a writer who didn't start writing till the late 20th century.  His over-representation is the most egregious example of "present-ism," the tendency to favor the recent past to the far past, that permeates any canon making exercise.

   Still, as a lover of literature and a particular fan of the birth of the novel in the 18th century, I can't personally help but love Foe, with it's in depth exploration into the meaning of Robinson Crusoe, all in the guise of a sympathetic female narrator, who is said to have been cast away with Crusoe and the real source for the early novel that DeFoe wrote.   Meta fictional technique is everywhere, strewn about like the boulders on the rocky island Crusoe finds himself inhabiting.

  The idea of rewriting a classic work of literature from the perspective of a minor (or invented) character was not original to Coeteze.  Specifically, Jean Rhys published Wide Sargasso Sea, famously written from the perspective of the "crazy wife in the attic" who haunts Jane Eyre.   That book is typically called a prequel, whereas Foe is a kind of imaginative retelling.

Published 3/29/17
The Drowned and the Saved  (1986)
 by Primo Levi

  I'm not trying to diss Primo Levi, the poet lauerate of the Holocaust, but it is unclear to me why The Drowned and the Saved is the single book of philosophical essays included in the 1001 Books list. It is no doubt due to the literary quality of Levi's writing, as well as the importance of the subject matter, but doesn't that open up the 1001 Books list to whole realms of non-fiction and philosophy that are otherwise wholly excluded?

  Certainly, Levi's elaboration of the world view of the Concentration camp, the weltanschauung expands in this, his final work, to include the world of the Soviet gulag, and he really draws a universal, global perspective on the totalitarian death camp.   He also thinks deeply about the groups who survived the experience, focusing on the helpers, including fellow Jews who were in charge of operating the gas chambers themselves.  Think about that for a minute.  That was something the Nazi's did, they made Jews operate the death chamber,  Levi also points out that very, very few of these individuals actually survived, being witness to horrific crimes that were kept secret from the general population.

  Levi explores the Nazi end game.  In his opinion, the crazy machinations at the end of the war were a conscious effort by the Nazi regime to destroy the evidence, and in that way he both exonerates and condemns the German people as a whole.  The whole end of the book is devoted to his correspondence with German readers, and he also devotes a chapter to the process of translating the book into German.  Levi, of course, was from Italy, and he saw the German language translation of his works as a kind of reckoning for Germans who claimed they didn't know what was going on.

   And you know, I'm not a hysteric about our current political situation.  I don't think that it rises to the kind of crisis some people make it out to be.  It helps if you actually know about the Nazi's were and what they actually did.  

Published 4/5/17

Old Devils (1986)
 by Kingsley Amis

  Old Devils was the Booker Prize Winning book that Kingsley Amis deserved for  a career that began with him as a fringe member of the "angry young men" of post-War English fiction, and ended with laureates, accolades, and a son who was arguably even more successful at being a novelist than his dad.

  I love this two sentence summation of the plot from Wikipedia:

       Alun Weaver, a writer of modest celebrity, returns to his native Wales with his wife, Rhiannon, sometime girlfriend of Weaver's old acquaintance Peter Thomas. Alun begins associating with a group of former friends, including Peter, all of whom have continued to live locally while he was away. While drinking in the house of another acquaintance, Alun drops dead, leaving the rest of the group to pick up the pieces of their brief reunion

   There you have it, people, Old Devils in a paragraph.  Old Devils is also very...Welsh, in the sense that it takes place in Wales, outside of Swansea, I believe, and Alun Weaver is a "writer of modest celebrity" in that he is the pet Welsh poet/public intellectual for the BBC.  He is also a compulsive philanderer, in his very British way.   Like his other 1001 Books qualifier, The Green Man, Old Devils concerns itself with a group of men who, one imagines, were known directly to Amis.  It doesn't seem like any of the characters are meant to be Amis himself.

  It's not hard to call Amis pere a dinosaur.  His characters are bloated, white, privileged, alcoholics and philanders.  Not the landed aristocracy of the 19th century novel, but the the class of 20th century professional intellectuals, some successful, some not so much.   He couldn't be further away from the hot trends in 1980's literature- no diversity, racial or economic, no post-modern pyrotechnics, no infusion of magical realism.  Just unhappy British people.  But it's so, so well done.  Amis manages to draw some universal truths out of a creative milieu that had been left for dead by a half century of literary progress.  And he won a Booker Prize, an award that did not exist when he started writing.

 

Published 4/11/17
The Lost Language of Cranes (1986)
by David Leavitt

   The Lost Language of Cranes is a father/son gay coming of age novel set against the back-drop of the AIDS era in New York.  It's a world where the closeted gay father  seeks furtive pleasures in a gay porno theater, while the son  slowly moves into his own gay adulthood while he works as an editor of romance novels.  It is a world permeated with Laura Ashley and Häagen-Dazs ice cream, the 1980's,  It also incorporates an African American lesbian with conservative parents, and the co-op movement in New York real estate.  A heady combination.  You can smell the Laura Ashley pot-por-ri.

 And of course, AIDS, which lurks in the background but never emerges as foreground.  No one gets AIDS, no one dies of AIDS.  No one talks about people dying from AIDS.  It seems a strange thing to say about the novel that represents gay New York culture in the 1980's.  Isn't AIDS THE story from that period?  

Published 4/13/17
Extinction (1986)
 by Thomas Bernhard

   Within the precincts of the original 1001 Books list, Bernhard is a major 20th century German author, with six novels making the cut.  That number was reduced in half for the first revision in 2008.  Extinction, his last novel, survived the initial reduction, and that makes sense.  Extinction is by far Bernhard's longest work, and it serves as a kind of summation for his entire oeuvre.

  Loosely put, Bernhard's concern is to serve an indictment against the entire world, focused through his perspective as an Austrian national living in the aftermath of World War II.  Although the characters change, they all share a common narrative style: close, cramped, obsessively and repetitively teasing out all the potential consequences of a certain emotion or experience.   It's novelist as OCD sufferer,  While some of his works are divided into parts, chapters and paragraphs are non-existent.  Instead the reader - of any of his books - is forced to follow the narrator through pages and pages of densely written prose.

   Extinction is one of those novels that both infuriates and enthralls.  Even though it is only 311 pages, Extinction took me weeks to read, because I could not keep my place.  Eventually I was forced to sit down and read it in 50 to 100 page gulps.  Every time I put Extinction down, upon resuming I would have to re-read the previous few pages.  Each page took me several minutes to read- unusual- since I usually read something more than one page a minute for a typical work of fiction (100 pages an hour).

  I've been bringing up Thomas Bernhard in casual conversation whenever possible- which is tough- but I've yet to find a single other person who has even heard of him.  He's worth checking out if only for that reason, since his books are widely translated and available.  The end of Extinction, where Bernhard tells his readers (via his narrator) that the only way to avoid the catastrophe of modernity is to "kill yourself before the millennium" rings eerily true in 2017.  Thomas Bernhard is not surprised by Donald Trump.  Nothing could be less surprising to him.

Published 4/15/17
Anagrams (1986)
 by Lorrie Moore

   I wouldn't call Anagrams a core title on the 1001 Books list, one of the 708 books that have stayed through all editions of the 1001 Books list.  The editors of the 1001 Books list would call Anagrams a core title, because it is a core title on the 1001 Books list.  Moore is an author who has straddled the line between short stories and novels, balancing both with a career in Academia- thirty years at the University of Wisconsin and now at Vanderbilt University.   She is a professional academic, and Anagrams, her first novel, is a prime example of the genre of "professional academic literature."  It's a major trend, still on going, and it concerns itself with the lives of professional and would be professional academics, living and working on or near a university campus, and almost all of them white, from a middle or upper class background (though not happy about it) and straight.

  Brenna Carpenter, the primary protagonist in Anagrams, shares biographical details with the author- both worked as para-legals in New York, both worked in academia.  Moore is a precursor of the manic-pixie dream girl, though one might more appropriately call her a manic-depressive pixie dream girl.  She's quirky! She sleeps with students! She invents an imaginary daughter.  It's this last detail that, I think, is the crux of Anagrams.  The fact that her daughter is imaginary is stated once, baldly, as a fact, then for the rest of the book she might as well be real.  After the initial disclosure, Carpenter makes no reference to the fact that her daughter does not exist.

  Anagrams hasn't aged particularly well, except as a capsule of that mid 1980's, anti-yuppie, professional-academic sub-culture.  Despite the essentially sad subject matter, Moore maintains a light touch that harkens back to her personal history as a prize winner of short story contests from an early age.   The short story is really hard done by within the precincts of the 1001 Books list.

The Parable of the Blind (painting)(1568) by Pieter Breugel, the book is based on imagined evets from 

Published 4/16/17
The Parable of the Blind (1986)
by Gert Hofmann

   The Parable of the Blind is a fun little novella about the (imagined) circumstances behind the painting of the same name, created in 1586 by Pieter Breugel.  The idea is that Breugel, unnamed in the book, paid to have models enact the painted scene, again and again, in the same way that one might imagine a Hollywood director having an actor do dozens of takes.  Here, the blind are stumbling into the river, a scene they repeated numerous times, as Breugel sits in his window and paints them.

   The rest of the book describes their attempts to get to the house of Breugel,  The Parable of the Blind is an impressionistic narrative, since the narrators, are blind beggars with no formal education.  To the extent it resembles anything else in literature, the closed comparison is Chaucer, call this "The Blind Beggars Tale."

A photo of a young Joyce Carol Oates

Published 4/18/17
Marya (1986)
 by Joyce Carol Oates

   You might consider Marya a Joyce Carol Oates origin story.  Marya, the title character, physically resembles Oates, shares a similar background and has the same experiences as Oates the writer.  Within the 1001 Books project, Oates is a huge loser.  She starts with four titles in the original edition, and that number is cut to a single title in the first revision.  This reduces Oates from a repeat player of some note to a one hit wonder, for the purposes of the list.  It also points to the way that many, if not all, authors with multiple titles- certainly all those from the 20th century and beyond- were subject to having their contribution halved.

  I'd be inclined to think that Oates was ill served- she is almost certainly an author who deserves more than a single title.  It's likely that she is a victim of both being prolific, still writing and not a major literary prize winner.  Oates is not going to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, she hasn't won the Pulitzer Prize.  She's also written non fiction and short stories throughout her career, and flirted with the career of a public intellectual in the television era.

  Like Anagrams by Lorrie Moore, Marya hasn't aged well, except as it relates to a general up-swell of appreciation for Oates as she ages out of productivity.  Most of Mayra exists within the confines of the academic literature of the 1980's.  Her plight as a white woman, making her way in academia, has only muted relevance to the polyphonic explosion of viewpoints related to class and gender.   At least Oates, unlike Moore, avoids writing from a place of vested privilege.  

Cover art for Nights at the Circus by Angela Carter

Published 5/3/17
Nights at the Circus (1984)
 by Angela Carter

   The Twin Peaks principle of popular entertainment might be that works that alienate a significant portion of the largest general audience ALSO create a higher level of audience appreciation among the remaining audience.  This heightened level of audience reaction among a smaller set of the largest general audience for a work of popular culture (a television show on a major network before the internet) is a key to maintaining a larger audience for a longer time period vs. works that appeal to a larger audience initially.  The Twin Peak principle is a specific example of the "cult" art work phenomenon, largely but not wholly confined to the 20th century, where a work fails to find an audience during it's initial release, and is only "discovered" years after the initial publication of the work.

   Nights at the Circus is an interesting literary example of this Twin Peaks principle, a work that is off-putting to large portions of the audience for literary fiction, but whose appeal to those who remain has formed the basis for an enduring audience. Largely written in a post-modern approximation of a Cockney patois from the early 20th century, Nights at the Circus is about a half-woman/half-swan and the American journalist who is trying to get the scoop, in the same way that Ulysses by James Joyce is about a guy walking around Dublin.

    Even if you are passably familiar with the Cockney dialect of the main character, Carter deploys many of the techniques of high post-modernism to obscure the development of the narrative, mis-identifying characters, relying on dialogue without any framing narration, skipping through time and space between chapters and generally omitting all of the signaling techniques that novelists typically use to guide audience expectations of what comes next.

  Which is not to say that Nights at the Circus doesn't have it's moments, when Sophie Fevvers- the swan woman, coherently recounts the circumstances of coming of age in a turn of the century whore house in London, or when the Circus is marooned in the Russian Tundra, the hostages of Russian peasant rebels who have decided that the help of Fevvers is crucially necessary to the pursuit of their cause.  It is clear that the number of works of "experimental" literature is declining as a percentage of the books included on the initial 1001 Books list.

  If you compare, let's say, the 1920's- with it's 67 titles within the 1001 Books list, there are very few books included that aren't experimental or cutting-edge in some significant way.   Authors with multiple titles in the 1920's portion of the list include arch modernists like Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf and Proust.  Many of the one time appearing French and German language authors from the 1920's are experimental or avant garde: Nadja by Andre Breton, Radiguet, Alfred Doblin, Chirico, Faulkner was writing in America in the 1920's. Even mainline non-experimental writers from the 1920's like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway continue to exercise a disproportionate influence on contemporary literature and criticism.

  Few of the titles from the 1920's are what you would call "block busters" or "hits," mostly because they hadn't really been identified back then, but there was a developed international market for fiction. In the 1980's, most of the books are commercial hits first, critic certified second.  Most of the titles from the 1980's are still in print, still being sold in book stores.

Published 5/16/17
Life & Times of Michael K. (1983)
 by J.M. Coeteze

  Life & Times of Michael K. was the first Booker Prize winning book written by South African turned Australian author J.M. Coeteze.  His other Booker Prize winner was Disgrace, in 1999.  He followed that with the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003.  Since he 2003 he's published four more novels and some short story collections.   He stays out of the spotlight.   I'm a fan of Coeteze.  I'm not sure he deserves 10 titles in the 1001 Books list.  Does any author deserve that many entries?

  His ten titles from 2006 was cut to five in the first revision.  You'd expect a Booker Prize winning book to make the cut into the core 700 titles, and it does.  Like all of Coeteze's books, Life & Times of Michael K. is both deeply satisfying and disturbing at the same time.   Likewise, his South African landscapes are both familiar and alien.  Like Foe, another Coeteze written 1001 Books entry, Michael K. draws on the conventions of Robinson Crusoe- Michael K. isn't marooned on an island, he's isolated in a society at war, friend and family-less, desiring only his freedom.

   Descriptions of Michael K. often bring up the theme of human dignity, the will of the protagonist for freedom even at the cost of his own life.   He wants to sit quietly, not work for money so he can eat, and not, in fact, eat.  It is his failure to properly feed himself that for me was the enduring image of Michael K.   Although set in a civil war in South Africa, it might as well be a post-apocalyptic scenario.  South Africa, even at the best of times, always seems to be hovering at the edge of catastrophe.  Coeteze, writing before the collapse of the apartheid regime is careful to omit explicit references to race.  I had to resort to the Wikipedia page to discover that Michael K. is classified as "colored" or mixed-race, under the scheme of the apartheid regime.

Published 5/25/17
The Radiant Way (1983)
 by Margaret Drabble

  I found The Radiant Way tedious.  I'm not a huge Margaret Drabble fan, and I don't really care about here milieu-  the lives of upwardly striving working-class born women who were promoted into Cambridge University in England during the 1960's and 1970's.  The introduction of merit scholarships into English higher education was a novelty then, and that gives this tale of three such women some socio-political weight.   So far, so good.  It's more the women themselves- all of whom are unhappy for the entire length of the book, spending their time wondering why they are so unhappy, or knowing why they are so unhappy and simply wallowing in it for chapters at the time.

  Drabble is a keen observer of human nature, I often winced knowingly at her characters observations about their disintegrating/disintegrated marriages and relationships.  At the same time, those aren't really observations I need to enrich my life, and nothing she is has to say feels anything but utterly familiar.   Also, I'm of the firm opinion that England and Britain stopped meaning much after World War II, so the fiction of the this time period seems less relevant than the fiction from the height of the British Empire.  Not better or worse, but less relevant for sure.  The Radiant Way is fiction from drab 1980's England, about the rather drab decades preceding the 1980's, and there is hardly a bit of color or beauty in the whole book.  Mostly just whinging. 

Published 5/30/17
An Artist of the Floating World (1986)
by Kazuo Ishiguro

   Kazuo Ishiguro's career is a testament to the strength of the novel as an art form.  He was the child of Japanese emigrants to England, grew up in England, never went to Japan, wrote books written in English, set in Japan, then wrote books about England- won a Booker Award for Remains of the Day.  Remains of the Day got made into a movie that turned into a world beater, both critically and in terms of box office receipts.  

    The extent to which An Artist of the Floating World is "about" an actual historical Japan- it is set in an unidentified Japanese city during the American occupation period after World War II- is a matter of some debate.  Ishiguro grew up in post War England- not Japan.  Floating World is written in English. Masuji Ono- the aging painter who narrates Floating World, is coming to terms with his ill-fated participation in the Japanese war effort via his propaganda posters- the Shep Fairey of his day, as it were.

   In the present, he grapples which arise as a result of his un-analyzed role in Japan's disastrous experiment with totalitarianism.  One of his daughters is on the eve of marriage, and he worries that his history will destroy the match.  He makes his way to his former compatriots- including one who was actually imprisoned directly as a result of his denunciation, and eventually acknowledges moral culpability in a very, very, very, Japanese way.

  The question of "authenticity" as it relates to an obviously good novel written by an English language author of Japanese ancestry who was raised in England is a curious one.  I would argue that Floating World demonstrates that the novel- either written in English or translated into English- becomes, in the late 20th century, an art form which transcends the original language. 

Published 6/3/17
The Busconductor Hines (1984)
 by James Kelman

  The Busconductor Hines is what you might call "Scottish kitchen sink realism," about said Busconductor (as supposed to Bus Driver) working on the Glasgow city bus system.  For those who don't know the "Glasgow Effect" is the unexplained phenomenon by which the life expectancy of people from Glasgow is ten years lower than for those living outside of Glasgow.

  The events take place over a few days,  Hines loses his job, and gets it back at the end... I think.  He's got an unhappy wife, a young baby (or Bairn as he calls it) and a shitty bedsit in Glaswegian slum.  Hines needs to wake up super early to get the work, except when he has a super late shift.  For whatever reason, he has trouble getting up on time.  That was a personal trait I've never understood, like, either you need to get up and you do, or you don't need to get up, and you don't, but Hines is very much a connoisseur of the alarm clock, and Kelman treats the reader to an "Eskimo words for snow" situation describing the various ways Hines fails with his alarm clock.

  The Busconductor Hines was Scottish writer James Kelman's first novel.  He would go on to win the Booker Prize in 1994, and Hines is, I think, the only novel on the list that captures the (now familiar, to me, I think) Glasgow patter/slang.   Kelman also throws in a hefty gob of graphic sex and enough swearing to bring down the wrath of effete English literary critics.  In this way, he is a clear antecedent of Irving Welsh.

Published 1/3/18
The Unwomanly Face of War (1985)
by Svetlana Alexievich

  To the surprise of many English-language readers, Svetlana Alexievick, a Belarusian journalist, received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2015.  My understanding that she was basically unknown, and at the time she won, none of her books were in still in print, in English.  All of her big titles received new English language translations with mainline US publishers after her Nobel win, and I decdied to take the plunge after my recent experience reading The House of Government by Yuri Slezkine.

  The Unwomanly Face of War is largely (but not entirely) prose renditions of various interviews conducted with female Red Army veterans who participated in World War II.  The passages are interspersed with italized musings by the "author": although presented as non-fiction, the material is clearly stylized in a way that brought her to the attention of the Committee that awards the Nobel Prize in Literature.  At the time, she was hailed as the first journalist to win the prize, but in the aftermath of the win, her interviews made it clear that she does not view herself as a journalist.

 As Alexievich makes quite clear, women in the Red Army fought in front line combat roles, and even had roles as field commanders and field "commissars" (the representative of the Russian Communist government, serving alongside the military staff.)  Alexievich, despite her prose style, let's the women speak for themselves, and limits her observations to breezy, philosophical type musings and comments about her method.  Well worth the time it take to read, Alexisevich is a welcome addition to the canon via her Nobel Prize win in 2015.

Published 4/10/18
The Handmaids Tale (1985)
 by Margaret Atwood

   I wasn't hugely surprised when Hulu announced a Season 2 for their smash hit television version of The Handmaid's Tale, by Margaret Atwood.  The book, of course, has no sequel, so presumably they'll be writing a new chapter.  I haven't finished the television series yet, but the idea that they would write a whole second season out of nothing doesn't offend me as I thought it might.  The book itself is more or less genre fiction, Margaret Atwood's literary pedigree.  What is unusual about The Handmaid's Tale is the anti-feminism which animates The Republic of Gilead, the authoritarian dictatorship which has replaced the United States of America in Atwood's alternate present of the book.

   The key, animating fact in Atwood's dystopia is a precipitous decline in the birth rate, brought about by a poorly understood intersection of chemicals and ungodliness.  This decline spurs a shadowy network of "think tanks" called the sons of Jacob, to come up with their new model society, which combines elements of New England Puritanism and Mormon pluralism with more far a field influences like Asian-style quietism and an economy that functions without money.

   Offred's gilded cage is contrasted both with her life before Gilead, where she married a divorced man (illegal under the new regime) and gave birth successfully to a child who was taken by the new regime; the other alternative is being dispatched to "The Colonies" (roughly the south and south east) where a series of nuclear explosions and chemical attacks have rendered large swaths of territory uninhabitable.   Offred isn't stoked about her role as a breeding object, but she isn't exactly leaping at the prospect of a nasty, brutish and short existence in the Colonies.

  There is no denying the visual power of the imagery- which is well take by the television version.  The book, I think, is clumsier, in a way, particularly in the way Atwood included a thirty page addendum written from the far future, presenting the book as an authentic historical manuscript.  I understand why you would do that in the context of dystopian fiction, but it seems like a genre move. 

Published 7/30/18
White Noise (1985)
by Don DeLillo

  This novel has not aged well. White Noise was a critical sensation and best seller when it was published in 1985 and it when on to win the National Book Award and cement DeLillo's status as a "serious" literary author who could also draw popular interest.  White Noise is probably the worst Audiobook I've listened to- I seriously regretted the choice as soon as I heard the voice of Professor Jack Gladney- Professor of Hitler Studies at a made-up liberal arts college somewhere in the industrial mid-west.  If I'm not mistaken, Gladney always wears full robes and dark glasses when he is on campus, a solid indication of the satirical intent of almost every aspect of White Noise.  Satirical yes, funny no, or at least not so much nearly 35 years down the road.

  The various bits that have made it from White Noise into our larger popular culture: Professor of Hitler Stories, the Airborne Toxic Event (which is now a band), detailed descriptive passages about shopping in a super market as a carefully considered aesthetic event are more like the literary equivalent of Simpsons-esque site gags then milestones in late 20th century American literature.  DeLillo is clearly writing in the high era of white-suburban privilege, where a novel about unhappy academic-intellectuals could capture the second highest prize in American literature with nary a nod to "different view points" or "diversity."  DeLillo, alongside Auster and Franzen are the last generation of this half-smugly satisfied half-perpetually anxiety riven literature of white, male privilege. 

Published 8/28/15
Less Than Zero (1985)
 by Bret Easton Ellis

   I bought an original-cover paperback copy of Less Than Zero in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco when I was home from my freshman year of college, which would have been 1995.  I still own that copy- pulled it off the shelf in my office yesterday, in fact.  It is the oldest book in my library that I actually remember purchasing.   Less Than Zero would qualify as one of my top ten favorite books of all time, and I always felt that it perfectly captured the attitude of well-off young people from California living in the early 1980's.

   Ellis isn't a one hit wonder, not with American Psycho, Rules of Attraction and Glamorama to his credit, but you could argue that he is a borderline washed-up embarrassment, and that his best work is literally decades behind him at this point. Certainly, he hasn't come close to capturing the attention of a mass audience since American Psycho became a genuine cultural phenomenon.

   This time, I read it as an Ebook- it was a good Ebook pick, short, terse, familiar.   I had forgotten just how shocking some of the material was: Muriel shooting up heroin while people film her, the dead body found in a Hollywood alley and the 12 year old sex slave being plyed by heroin.  I had also forgotten that the book has a scene where Clay watches his friend get sodomized by a closeted midwestern business man for several hour- the cut away from the scene being, "He rolled Julian over..."

  Twisted stuff!  Details obscured by the film, which is a Reagan era anti drug homily with none of the transgressive charm of the book.

Published 2/26/19
Democracy (1984)
by Joan Didion

Replaces: Downriver by Iain Sinclair


  I can't imagine what happened between 2006, when the first 1001 Books edition was published without including Joan Didion's 1984 novel, Democracy, and 2008, when the second edition was published and Democracy replaced Downriver by Iain Sinclair.  Didion has a literary reputation that doesn't quite match with the novel-centric approach of the 1001 Books project.  Didion has written several novels, but she's best known for her non fiction, and her status as a Californian with substantial ties to Los Angeles makes her hugely suspect to the London based editorial staff of the 1001 Books project.

   Democracy has nothing to do with Los Angeles.   It is, instead, about Inez Victor, the Jackie O esque (I'm assuming?) wife of U.S. Senator and Presidential hopeful Harry Victory.  The Wikipedia page also mentions her enduring extra marital love affair with CIA fixer Jack Lovett.  Didion also throws in a post-modern curveball by using herself as the narrator.  It's an unusual post-modernist fillip to place on top a conventional narrative about the ennui of 20th century American elites.

  I can't explained between 2006 and 2008 that elevated Democracy onto the 1001 Books list.  Maybe you can point to a general late career revival she experienced- maybe it was triggered by her Pulitzer Prize in 2006 for  The (non fiction) Year of Magical Thinking, about the death of her husband.   I read Democracy as an Ebook- making it one of the few of the more than 250 books from the first revision of the 1001 Books list to actually be available as an Ebook.   I'm only about 45 books in and already I had to go back to the mid 1980's to find a readily available Ebook from the list that was available from the Los Angeles Public Library.   Very few books not written originally in English make it into the ecosystem of Ebooks and Audiobooks, and almost all of those are new releases.  If you go back, 10, 20, 30 years, books that have been translated into English are almost totally absent from electronic formats. 

Published 3/11/19
Annie John  (1985)
by Jamaica Kincaid

Replaces: A Heart So White by Javier Marias

  Everyone would have to agree that the Caribbean is a prime location of post-colonial fiction.  Led by V.S. Naipaul (Trindad) the Caribbean has produced a generation of authors- almost all of whom write in English- who have depicted the issues central to Caribbean identity, both on the island and in emigrant communities in the UK, US and Canada.   Jamaica Kindkaid (Antigua) is one of those cross-geographical writers, raised on a small Caribbean island and later educated and resident in the United States (New Hampshire for school, teaches in Vermont).

  The distinction between writers with that split in experience is crucial in all post-colonial fiction, I think.  It is much more difficult/impossible for authors who actually RESIDE in post-colonial locations like the Caribbean, Latin America, Africa and India to find an international audience for their literary fiction, and the domestic market is sometimes non-existent.   Here, Kincaid entirely omits her personal life experience in the United States, and Annie John is entirely about the eponymous protagonist and narrator, who lives on a small island on the Caribbean with her difficult (but loving?) mother and her much older carpenter father.

  This isn't a "hard" third world bildungsroman- it is clear that Annie's family is not well off, but they are relatively well educated for their societal position- in a memorable scene near the end Annie John recalls her mother telling her about Louis Pasteur being the reason for keeping her hands clean.  Annie John is in many ways the epitome of the too-smart-for-her-surroundings child narrator but is unique in her troubled relationship with her mother.

  This troubled relationship and her depiction of it is the reason- more than any geographical or racial/gender considerations, which mark Annie John as a canonical work.    Kincaid was famously embraced by arch-canonist Harold Bloom in his Bloom's Modern Critical Edition volume dedicated to Kincaid.  I haven't read that edition, but I think it is likely accurate to observe that there is much  more to Annie John and Kincaid then might at first be apparent.   Because of the hidden complexity, I have some regrets about choosing the (2016) Audiobook edition- I would have liked to see the printed pages of this book.

  On the other, hand, like many other books written by Caribbean writers, the Audiobook version is a treat for the accents.  Surely it is an under-appreciated merit of the Audiobook that you get to listen to someone who actually speaks the same dialect as the characters.  If I was reading the printed book, in my head, the characters would probably just sound like regular Americans.

Published 4/24/19
The Anatomy Lesson (1983)
by Philip Roth

  The Anatomy Lesson is the third book in the initial Zuckerman trilogy, later published together with books one and two as Zuckerman Unbound.  Both wikipedia and I agree that The Anatomy Lesson is the weakest of the initial Zuckerman trilogy.  The Anatomy Lesson picks up with Zuckerman after the death of his father and mother, plagued by an undiagnosable back pain that causes him to spend most of his time on his back in his apartment, unable to write.

  Zuckerman is ministered to by a variety of women, a nurse, students, typists, and others.   I'm sure Roth would agree that The Anatomy Lesson is Zuckerman at his least, a condition compounded by what can only be described as a "drug addled" decision to abandon writing and enroll in medical school in Chicago.   Off he jets to Chicago in the middle of winter, gobbling pain pills and smoking joints in the airplane bathroom (was that ever something people did?) before an encounter with a college classmate, now a surgeon in Chicago and the man Zuckerman is counting on to get him into medical school, sends him teetering off the edge, landing him in the hospital, where The Anatomy Lesson ends. 

Published 4/30/19

The Prague Orgy (1985)
 by Philip Roth

  The Prague Orgy is typically described as the fourth novel in Roth's nine volume Zuckerman series, about his alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman.  It isn't a novel- it's only 77 pages in print- either a novella or a long short story.  It also marks Zuckerman's departure from the United States into parts unknown, here Prague, later England and Israel.    In The Prague Orgy, Zuckerman is dispatched from the United States to Communist Czechoslovakia, where he has been tasked by an expatriate/exiled Czech writer to recover the unpublished short stories of his father- written in Yiddish. 

  In Czechoslovakia he encounters the very horny and desperate, an embittered ex-wife of the exiled Czech writer, currently in possession of the desired manuscripts, as well as the Czech secret police, and then it is all over.   The Prague Orgy has also been called a coda to the first three Zuckerman books, which by then had been published in one volume as Zuckerman Bound.   Today, the first three Zuckerman books are published individually, as is The Prague Orgy, though I can't imagine spending fifteen dollars on a seventy seven page Philip Roth novel. 

Published 5/2/19
Black Box (1985)
 by Amos Oz

Replaces:  Master of St. Petersburg by J.M. Coetzee


  I'm fifty plus books deep into the first revision of the 1001 Books list, and as you can see, I've made it into the 1980's.  Amos Oz was omitted from the first book and then got two titles into the first revision, one of those authors who hasn't quite won the Nobel Prize in Literature but who has managed to make an international literary reputation from a relative backwater (Israel) in the world literature scene.   Oz has a reputation as a pacifist and an advocate for Arab/Israeli peace, but you wouldn't know it from Black Box, which is about a divorced couple, he a wealthy and internationally famous professor of conflict studies working in Chicago at an American University, she his unfaithful wife, struggling to raise their wayward son and saddled with a new husband with his own agenda.

  Black Box develops in epistolary form, letters back and forth, from the husband to the wife, the wife to the husband, from the son to the father, the father to his lawyer, the step father to the father, etc.   It's an unusual format for a book written in the 1980's, the epistolary novel having largely passed out of fashion in the late 18th century.   Like the other Amos Oz book on the 1001 Books list in 2008, Black Box is an almost entirely humorous affair, and the whole exercise reminded me of a Philip Roth novel with all the fun parts cut out.  Maybe it's because I'm simultaneously making my way through the Zuckerman books, some of which take place in Israel during the early 1980's.   I would be hard pressed to recommend Black Box.

Published 5/13/19
The Counterlife (1986)
 by Philip Roth

   Philip Roth just has so many excellent books.  It's not a question of picking three along the lines of representing early, middle and late period Roth.  You really need to make it through a half dozen titles to get a feeling for just how good Roth was and for how long he was good (to the end.)  The Counterlife is a highlight of Nathan Zuckerman sequence- fifth in line behind the first three books and The Prague Orgy, which is a novella and a coda to the first trilogy.   The Counterlife is a favorite of literary critics because of the high modernist technique on display.  The Counterlife deals in multiple, conflicting "alternate timelines" that only escape being designated science fiction by the utterly quotidian similarities between the differing descriptions of events.

  In one timeline, Henry, Nathan's brother- who has figured prominently in other of the Zuckerman books up to this point- is unable to cope with being rendered impotent by heart medication, undergoes bypass surgery and dies on the operating table, leaving Nathan musing over fate and in conversation with Henry's widow.   In a second timeline, Henry has survived the surgery and emigrated to Israel, where he becomes involved in the West Bank settlement movement.  Nathan travels to Israel to try to woo him back to his life in suburban New Jersey, where he maintains his succesful dental practice.  In a third timeline, it is Nathan who has died from heart surgery.  Here, it is his love for the English wife of the diplomat living upstairs, improbably named Maria, that motivates the surgery, together with his newly expressed desire for a "normal life" with a wife and child.

   Despite being well received when it was published, the legacy of The Counterlife has suffered compared to the fate of his stand-alone novels.  Sure, it's a great book, but you 100% have to have read the earlier books in the series, particularly the sequences devoted to the relationship between Henry and Nathan, to make sense of the particular genius The Counterlife contains.

Published 6/26/19
Ancestral Voices  (1986)
 by Etienne Van Heerden

Replaces:  The Emigrants by W.G. Sebald

  Etienne Van Heerden is an under-appreciated South African writer with strong American and European ties, including stints at the Iowa Writer's Workshop and the University of Leiden.  Van Heerden was raised speaking Afrikaans, but Ancestral Voices was written in English.   Van Heerden never formally broke with the Apartheid era South African regime, and he wasn't persecuted, but he was on the right side of history, and a member of one of the first organized group of Afrikaner writers to meet with the African National Congress.

  Ancestral Voices takes the form of an investigation into the mysterious death of an intellectually challenged bastard-child of a wealthy Afrikaner farming family.  The child falls down one of many bore holes that dot the property in an endless effort to secure fresh water for the farm.  The magistrate- the central figure in the story- arrives from the city months after the death, and only one thing is clear: no one is talking. 

  Ancestral Voices is a frank narrative about the Afrikaner ruling class, in all their ugly glory.  Like books about the white slave owning class of the Southern United States, it's possible to see glory and shame in the achievements of the pioneer Afrikaners.  Yes, they were genocidal towards the unorganized tribes men who they found near their land.   I guess, in their favor, you could say that they didn't get involved in trading slaves, and frequently dealt with the remaining black-African population with something resembling respect.

  Not the family in this book though- where the interracial offspring of a son of the family and the daughter of an early black servant becomes a subject of generations of tension.   At times, it is unclear where Van Heerden is headed with the investigation itself, which ends up being an exploration of generations of racial and family grievances.    Of course, that is the point, and the detective story who dun it is just a hook to get the reader involved in the lives of this tragic clan.

German author Brotho Strauß

Published 9/4/19
The Young Man (1984)
by Botho Strauß

Replaces: Time's Arrow by Martin Amis

  "More obscure" is one observation to be made about the difference between the original edition of the 1001 Books project and the 2008 revision.  The general trend is to include more authors from less represented regions and languages, replacing authors largely from the United Kingdom who had three or more titles in the original edition.

   Strauss went from zero books in the first edition to two books in the second- making him a big omission, especially since both titles were published before 1990 and were presumably known to the editors when they were putting the first book together.  It's hard to say anything about the contents, but I am going to quote liberally from the excellent wikipedia page to spare myself the labor:

Leon Pracht, a young man, abandons a budding career in the footsteps of his father—a historian of religion specialised on Montanus—after the positive reception of his debut as a theatre director. He is recruited for an adaptation of Jean Genet's The Maids in Cologne, starring the two diva actresses Petra "Pat" Kurzrok and Margarethe "Mag" Wirth. However, Pat and Mag turn out to be too much to handle. Leon asks for advice from the local star director Alfred Weigert, but still fails to actualise his vision for the play.

A woman enters a forest and finds a department store named The Tower of the Germans. After a phantasmagorical episode she finds herself naked in front of the proprietor of the Germans. The proprietor of the Germans is a large, floating head which is half man and half carp.

A man is doing a study on an alternative community whose members are known as the Syks. After observing their unusual habits he commits a social error which freaks out a local woman. He is banished from the colony and takes part in a dreamlike ritual involving scatological sexual activity. Afterwards his female colleague writes a scathing report about his unprofessional behaviour.

A king dies and is condemned as a criminal, which becomes a long-lasting national trauma. At a terrace behind the castle, a number of people are gathered: the paramedic Reppenfries, his sister-in-law Paula and wife Dagmar, the beautiful Almut, the "modern" Hanswerner, the mail clerk Yossica, and the narrator, Leon. Each person tells a personal story or discusses art and philosophy.

Later, Leon finds Yossica who has been transformed into a clump of earth with a face. She explains how she, an aspiring songwriter, had met two peculiar talent scouts, Schwarzsicht and Zuversicht. The first, dressed in ragged clothes, offered her a slowly developing talent which eventually would result in timeless quality. The second, dressed elegantly and dancing, offered her to become the leading star of a new trend. Yossica tried to trick the agents so she could have both, but the attempt failed badly and she became a lump of earth. She asks Leon to bring her with him and put her in soil so she can grow into her former self.

Leon works as a photographer and lives with Yossica. She convinces him to go and meet Alfred Weigert who is staying at a skyscraper hotel in their city. Weigert has had a massive success as Ossia, the main character is a series of comedy films which he also directed. As Ossia—the name he has become known under also in private—he brilliantly captures the German national character, playing a Prussian vagabond described in the press as a mix between Parsifal and Paracelsus. Leon had been involved in the making of the first Ossia film but after that left the industry. When Leon and Yossica meet Ossia in his room, he has aged poorly and become an overweight recluse. He has not appeared as an actor in his last two films, which have been disjointed, pseudo-profound and not nearly as successful as the previous ones. In desperation, Ossia asks Leon to collaborate on a new film project. Ossia hands him notes to read and starts to explain the project, intended as a vehicle for Pat in a great female comedic role, but the film lacks structure and Leon disapproves of it. Leon asks Ossia to come along for a walk to get some fresh air, but Ossia declines and remains inside the tower.

       There you go, people! Even reading the description it is hard to make sense of what any of it means.  The fact that it is a "phantasmagorical" type of book written in German and translated into English doesn't help, but I would observe that it seems more like a book that would have been written in the 1920's than the 1980's.   It also reminded me of Italo Calvino, another author I need to revisit because I just didn't get much out of him the first time through. 

Published 9/9/16
Professor Martens' Departure (1984)
 by Jaan Kross

Replaces:  Wise Children by Angela Carter

  Estonian author Jaan Kross is one of those "almost but not quite" Nobel Prize nominees who are always described as, "the best known author of country x and nominee for the Nobel Prizee."   Here, the country is Estonia.   Kross is better known in German, where his career spanned the rise and fall of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union- he was imprisoned both by the Nazi's for his Estonian nationalism and the Soviets for the same thing, before returning to the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic in the mid 1950's and settling down as a professional writer.

   Kross was prolific during his career, he died in 2007, leaving behind 17 novels- maybe six of those have been translated into English, including Professor Martens' Departure, which most reminded me of An Artist of the Floating World by Kazuo Ishiguo- both books involve a notable historical figure recalling his life with regret.   The Professor Martens of this book is actually two Martens'- separated by a century- both of whom where Estonian scholars of International Law who made their names and careers working for the Russian Empire.

  The later Professor Martens is the major narrator, and he shifts relatively seemlessly between episodes from his life and the life of his earlier "double."   Important episodes include an affair with a Belgian artist, his role in the Russo-Japanese Treaty of Portsmouth (New Hampshire) and his career and education.  There is also a portion where the contemporary (late 19th early 20th century) bemoans his failure to win the just-launched Nobel Peace Prize.  Maybe that's why he never won.

 Kross replaces Wise Children- Angela Carter's last book.   Carter actually lost two of her three titles in the 1001 Books project in the first revision- keeping only Nights at the Circus, and it's another example of how the first revision of the 1001 Books list replaced "diversity" picks from the UK and USA with straight white men from lesser known countries. 

Published 9/27/19
The Christmas Oratorio (1984)
by Goran Tunström

Replaces: Possession by A.S. Byatt

  The Christmas Oratorio is a multi-generational family drama set in Sweden between 1930's and the present day (the 80's.)  The common theme linking the three generations- the father, the son, who qualifies as the protagonist, and a third generation.  The Nordensson family suffers tragedy from go, when the family matriarch dies in a freak bicycle accident, trampled by cattle on her way to the Church to perform the title track.

  Aron, the father, gives up the family farm and emigrates to the city, where he finds work minding the liquor supply of a local hotelier.  Sidner, the son (Aron is the father), has an unusual childhood in pre-World War II- I'm assuming it's Stockholm but I guess it could be Malmo or really any city in Sweden.   Sidner is a sad little boy with a weird little friend.  He hooks up with an older bohemian broad who is obsessed with a local explorer- they end up producing the third generation.  The father becomes increasingly erratic and leaves for New Zealand to meet a spinster- she becomes the last major character of the story.

  It's a classic second edition of the 1001 Books list pick- an underrepresented area (Sweden/Scandinavia) but the selection is a pedestrian one in terms of diversity: white, christian, men.

Published 10/22/19
Love Medicine  (1984)
by Louise Erdrich

Replaces: Black Dogs by Ian McEwan

  The absence of Chippewa-American author Louise Erdrich from the first edition of the 1001 Books list was a major omission, and they rectified the oversight in the first revision, replacing Black Dogs by the highly over-represented Ian McEwan with Love Medicine, Erdrichs' first book.  Erdrich won the National Book Award in 2012 for The Round House, and she has a galaxy of lesser awards and nominations.   Until Sherman Alexie broke through a decade later, she was the only Native American writer of literary fiction with a national/international profile.   Certainly, this was the case in the early 2000's, when the editors of the 1001 Books project were formulating their list, so her omission is puzzling.  It's probably due to the part that the UK isn't a big market for Native American issues and the editors were mostly or all from the UK.

   Love Medicine is exactly what your would picture in your head if you only knew that Erdrich was a writer of literary fiction, a Native American from Northern Minnesota, i.e. a complicated multi-generational family saga with plenty of inter and intra generational drama revolving around substance abuse and the genocidal legacy of the Europeans at the hands of the Natives. 

  The Ojiibwe suffered like all Native groups, but their experience was more akin to the managed retreat of the Iroquois than the genocidal experience of the tribes of the plains and southeast. Today, they are the fifth largest Native group in the United States.  So, the dysfunction is bad, but not the worst, and Erdrich's early emergence as a writer of Native themed literary fiction speaks the relationship between Natives and the locals (Erdrich herself is the daughter of a German-American and his Native wife.)

  

Published 10/22/19
Southern Seas (1986)
by Manuel Vasquez Montalblan

Replaces: The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul by Douglas Adams


  Southern Seas is one of a long series of books featuring the exploits of Pepe Carvalho, Barcelonian private detective and gourmand.   The thirteen book series is notable both for the gritty, "noir"-ish presentation of Barcelona, the writing about food and a take on politics that leans left and reminded me of the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo series by Swedish marxist Steig Larrsson

  Pepe Carvalho is sure to win you some cool points if you run into a sophisticated fan of detective fiction, and if you have been or are planning to go to Barcelona for any reason I'm sure any of the thirteen books makes for a fun backgrounder on the city.  There's a level of sex and violence that registers at the "R" level in the USA: readers who are fed up with straight white guys and their tough talk won't find any relief with Carvalho and his man servant, Biscuter.

  In this book, Cavalho is hired to solve the mysterious murder of a wealthy industrialist who had allegedly decamped to the "South Seas" a year before he was found murdered in a half-built apartment building in an unfashionable suburb.   

Published 11/13/19
The Back Room (1983)
 by Carmen Martin Gaite

Replaces: Foe by J.M. Coetzee


  Another diversity win- female Spanish language authors being a rarity in the 1001 Books project.  Isabel Allende is in there.  Laura Esquivel (Like Water for Chocolate) is in there.  That's it for women authors writing in the Spanish language.  Clarice Lispector, the Brazilian writer is represented, but Portuguese isn't the same as Spanish.

  The Back Room is familiar as another representative of the European existentialist novel with a hero- this time a woman- doing nothing, wallowing in memories and tacking between the uneventful present and the eventful past.  Basically, the narrator is interviewed by a stranger who comes to her apartment, she is a writer, and the questions concerns her past and the recent past of Spain, the Republic, the rise of Franco, etc.

  Gaite replaces yet another title by J.M. Coetzee- getting his 10 books trimmed to a more manageable number in the 2008 first revision of the 1001 Books list.

Published 12/14/19
Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (1985)
 by Haruki Murakami

  Non-english language novelists who achieve a combination of critical and popular success in ENGLISH occupy the highest rung of my canonical hierarchy.  Both critically acclaimed and popular native writers of English have an almost insurmountable advantage beyond knowing English as a native language- they also live in English speaking societies and often draw on those experiences to create literature that connects with readers.  Thus the achievement of a Murakami, a writer who does no write in English, and does not write about English speaking people, is worth exploring.

  As a baseline, it helps to be incredibly prolific and consistent.  Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World was already his fourth novel but it came before Norwegian Wood- his English language break-through, and so the English language edition of Hard-Boiled didn't come out until 1991.   It's nice that almost all of his books have Audiobook editions, though I've found the quality inconsistent. I think I'm ready to observe that there is something about Murakami- perhaps it is the quality of the translated prose, that makes the Audiobook format feel awkward.  In the last Murakami Audiobook I listened to, the narrator had a strong Japanese accented English, which was strange.  In this case the characters have different recognizable "western" methods of speaking- the absent minded professor, the noirish calcutec at the center of the Hard-Boiled Wonderland portion of the narrative (interspersed with the allegorical/fantastic chapters of the End of the World.

  Hard-Boiled Wonderland is a good book for Murakami completist, but the alternating chapters might be off putting for the casual reader.

Published 3/26/20
Ancient Evenings (1983)
by Norman Mailer

  Ancient Evenings has a reputation as the biggest flop in 20th century American literature, an attempt at a career defining, canon ensuring masterpiece that ended up with a reputation as incoherent and disgusting.    At least, that was my understanding circa 2014, when Matthew Barney released River of Fundament, a six hour film interpreting Ancient Evenings.   I watched the entire six hour film when it debuted at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and that event marked the beginning of the idea that I might actually read Ancient Evenings.

  Fast forward to last summer, back when we were free, I went to Provincetown Massachusetts and say Mailer's home, a local landmark.  That got me thinking about Ancient Evenings, and after a couple cocktails at a local bar the next night, I ordered the first edition hardback copy for a dollar on Amazon.   As it turned out, the spine was cracked, but still, a dollar.  I am well equipped for the challenge of a seven hundred page novel about ancient Egypt.  I'm not particularly interested in ancient Egypt itself, but I've long been familiar with the greater Ancient Near East, of which Egypt is an integral participant.    Thus, for example, I understood the background of the long running conflict between Pharaonic Egypt and the Hittite Empire of what is now Turkey, Syria and Lebanon.

  I was less familiar with the mythology, and Mailer opens with a hundred page portion on the highly incestuous, violent and murderous doings of the Ancient Egyptian Gods, who make the Greek pantheon look like a bunch of pussies.   I was having trouble following that part, but Mailer quickly moves into a more comprehensible recounting of the life and times of Menenhetet, who is at the time of the recounting a high priest/magician who is entertaining the Pharaoh at one of the interminable festivals that occupied most of the time of the ancient Egyptian nobility.

   Menenhetet spends most of the book recounting his first life, when he was born a peasant but rose to become a charioteer and favorite of the Pharaoh as well as a favorite of the Pharaoh's wife.  I actually found the middle of the book, where Menenhetet simply recites his (first) life and times to the present Pharaoh, engaging.   I lost the plot again towards the end, and I actually skimmed the last fifty pages.  I simply didn't care how Mailer chose to wrap up the story of the underlying narrator- a spirit in the underworld who is "talking" to the spirit of Menehetet in the afterlife.

  It is worth pointing out that Ancient Evenings is obscene by any reasonable definition of the term- tons of incest, three-ways, homo and hetero sexual rape, all of it rendered graphically.  I don't think Mailer gets enough credit for setting a novel in the pre-Christian world outside of Rome.  Whether he "got it right" or not misses the point, it's just the sheer, imaginative effort and depicting these characters from thousands of years ago is impressive.

Canadian pianist Glenn Gould, a central character in The Loser

Published 7/20/20

The Loser (1983)

by Thomas Bernhard

   A "funny" aspect of the Nobel Prize in Literature is when the committee give out a prize to a writer from a specific country and then NEVER give out one to the writer who was passed over.   The "classic" example is Philip Roth, both because he was an American literary celebrity who made a big deal out of it, even in his fiction and second because there are least two specific examples, 1976 when Saul Bellow won and 1978 when the prize was awarded to Isacc Bashevis Singer, after that it was just a long running joke, with the committee consistently favoring non-western or fringe-western writers to authors from "the big four": England, USA, Germany and France.   Bernhard died in 1989, but it was hard not to think of him not winning the Nobel when they gave it to Austrian author Peter Handke last year.    

   Handke's bitter anti-humanism and similarly crabbed style can't help but evoke Bernhard in my mind, and I feel like Bernhard has the larger presence in English translation. Is Bernhard considered a joke in serious literary circles?  I can't get enough.   He should have won the Nobel Prize- it's a more glaring omission than Roth.  The Loser, from his fertile middle period is about "his" friendship with two concert pianists, one of whom is Glenn Gould. The other is Wertheimer, who commits suicide- a frequent Bernhardian motif. 

Correction (1975) - (2016 Review)

Yes (1978) (2016 Review)

Concrete (1982) (2017 Review)

Old Masters (1985) (2017 Review)

Extinction (1986) (2017 Review)

Wittgenstein's Nephew (1988) (2017 Review)

Published 7/21/20

Silent House (1983) 

by Orhan Pamuk

     Not the best Orhan Pamuk book to tackle in Audiobook format, what with five different narrators handling the same period of weeks at a Turkish beach house outside of Istanbul.   You've got the dwarf/butler Recep, the elderly widow/grandmother Buyukhanim,  She is visited by three grandchildren, Faruk a dissolute student of history, drinking too much and dreaming of a life in America; Metin a high school student and granddaughter Nilgun.   The final narrator is Hasan, the nephew of Recep.  The major plot line is the involvement of Metin and Hasan in the civil unrest that proceeded the 1980 Turkish military coup- set to take place immediately after the action in the book ends.   Faruk, Recep and Grandma get their own chapters but inevitably take a back seat to the main action.

    Silent House is the first Pamuk book where he takes a legitimate stab and conveying contemporary youth culture, and based on what I read online it is one of his most enduring books in terms of attracting a young audience.  Personally, I prefer his historical mode, and Silent House was a slog- a long slog- it took me months to finish the Audiobook and John Lee, the usual narrator of all of Pamuk's book is reduced to the voice of only one of the narrators (Recep). 

Published 9/2/20

Woodcutters(1984)

by Thomas Bernhard

 Harold Bloom called Woodcutters Bernhard's "Masterpiece."   It's hard for me to even distinguish between his books- although it's considered the second book in his trilogy about the arts.  The other two books are The Loser about music- which is one of my favorites and Old Masters- about painting.  Woodcutters is about theater, or rather it is about the narrator sitting at a dinner party attended by the so-called "elite" of Viennese theater and talking shit about them.

   This arts trilogy is at the heart of his fractious relationship with the Austrian artistic elite.  Bernhard despised them, he took every opportunity to disparage artists working in Austria after World War II.  He feels the same way about Austrian society as a whole- I only wish there as an American equivalent.  If I wrote fiction, I would try to write the kind of fiction that Bernhard writes.  I would want readers to say, "He sounds like an American version of Thomas Bernhard."  I think I've mentioned before that I've never met another human being who has read a Thomas Bernhard novel, and at this point, I practically consider him my favorite author.  Think of how strange a situation that is for me.

Published 1/18/21

Chancer (1985)

by James Kelman

   I wouldn't have thought that a New Year's Eve trip to Montreal in 2019 would end up being the last time I took a trip anywhere for two years, but here we are, a year later, and I haven't been to an airport since I arrived back at LAX on January 1st of 2020.  I always like to buy a book when I go to a new city, and I found this cool paperback edition of Chancer by Scottish author James Kelman in a fun little book shop on the north side of town (S.W. Welch Bookseller.)  James Kelman is a classic 1001 Books author- his 1994 novel, How Late It Was, How Late won the Booker Prize in 1994, and The Busconductor Hines, his first novel, published in 1984, is another 1001 Books pick.

  Considering his bibliography runs 20 deep if you count all the short-story collections and novels, he's barely in print in the United States.  His most recent short story collection, Tales of Here & Then, published last year, doesn't even have an Amazon product listing.  So that is why I bought this Picador paperback copy of Chancer- in excellent condition, which is a 1990's era reprint.    I don't even think an American edition of this book exists.

   Similar to The Busconductor Hines, Chancer is a tale of working-class Glasgow youth.  Here, the youth in question is Tammas.  He lives with his sister and her husband- no word of the parents.  He makes his 'living' via the Sporting Life, betting on dogs and horses, usually at off-track betting sites in Glasgow.   He carries on a taciturn affair with an older woman who has a child, his social life is going to the pub and gambling- at the pub it's cards and dominos.   Tammas isn't the kind of dead-ender that one expects from the Irvine Welsh era of Scottish fiction, rather he's a young guy trying to figure out his path in the world. 

France McDormand in Blood Simple, her first film.

Published 3/11/21

Blood Simple (1984)

d. Joel Coen
Criterion Collection #834

  Joel and Ethan Coen are at the top of any discussion of recent Auteurs in American cinema.  It... is a meaty subject, if only because of the sheer productivity of director Joel and his writer brother Ethan, who have collaborated on something like 20 feature films since Blood Simple, their first, was released in 1984.   The argument for all time Auteur hall of fame status is rock-solid through their first decade: Raising Arizona (1987), Miller's Crossing (1990) and Barton Fink (1991), ending with a stumble with The Hudsucker Proxy (1994), the first strike they have against them in any conceivable career long evaluation.

  They rebound with Fargo (1996),  The Big Lebowski (1998)  and O Brother Where Art Thou(2000).  But then, the 2000's, with duds too numerous to break out by year: The Man Who Wasn't There, Intolerable Cruelty, The Ladykillers- their worst film; Burn After Reading, rounding out the decade.  Only No Country For Old Men (2007) would rate in any conceivable top five.  Similarly, the 2010's are an extremely mixed bag.  Inside Llewyn Davis was aight, Hail Caeser and Ballad of Buster Scruggs were not.   

  Ultimately, constructing a top five list.  Blood Simple has to be in the one, two or three slot.  Raising Arizona for sure also in one, two or three. The final top three slot is either Fargo or Miller's Crossing, I don't think you would have both in the same top five, I'd probably go with Fargo though I love Miller's Crossing.  For four and five, take two from Barton Fink, The Big Lebowski or O Brother Where Are Art Thou.  For me I would go Blood Simple, Raising Arizona, Fargo, Barton Fink and The Big Lebowski in that order.    At this point, there are just as many bad movies as good, but I don't think artists should be punished for being prolific.  It's possible for artists to work on different levels, and put different levels of effort into the final product, particularly in a highly collaborative art form like film. 

   Blood Simple, their first film, is an incredibly strong, durable Texas noir, which was released in 1984 but has a timeless quality that has kept it watched in subsequent decades.  I returned to it recently after watching Nomadland, starring France McDormand, and I was reminded of her performance as the femme fatale in this film, her first.  McDormand is also the star of Fargo, a movie that won her her first Academy Award for Best Actress.  McDormand is magnetic in Blood Simple, as is Dan Hedaya- the ambiguously ethnic heavy. 

   Finally, it's important to remember that Blood Simple was an independent film that cost 1.5 million to make and grossed 3.8 million at the box office during it's initial run.  That is just incredible to consider.  Even today that would only be a 3 million dollar budget.  Incredible.

Published 1/24/122

Salvador (1983)

by Joan Didion

.

   I mourned the death of Joan Didion like everyone. She is one of those writers of the mid to late 20th century that managed to capture the spark of mass-market celebrity while maintaining admiration from the critical class.  She managed to survive to see herself become an icon.  The photos of her from the 1970's are just- first rank icon level images, up there with images of Elvis and  Marilyn Monroe.   Didion had two books on the original 1001 Books list- Slouching Towards Bethlehem, which is surely her classic, and Democracy, which was popular when it came out (1984) but hasn't aged with the grace or relevance of Slouching Towards Bethlehem.

  In honor of her death I wanted to just read, something, anything by Didion and Salvador, published in 1983, looked promising. Clocking in at a sprightly 108 pages, Salvador recounts a trip Didion took to El Salvador during the Civil War of the early 1980's. Trapped in a hotel in the capital, she takes a government chaperoned trip to the front lines, doesn't see much and returns to her hotel. Salvador points out one of the weaknesses of New Journalism a la Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson.  Any writer with a sufficiently big draw can go on an assignment, see nothing, accomplish nothing, return home, write, basically, a short story or novella at their experience in a strange place doing nothing, and a first-rate magazine or Sunday Magazine of a newspaper would publish it. 

   So Salvador is cool as hell, but it isn't very enlightening about, you know, events during the Civil War there in the late 1970's and 1980's. 

Published 3/9/22

The Bone People (1984)

by Keri Hulme

    I frequently find new books to read after reading the Sunday Obituaries in the New York Times.  The weekend edition Obituaries are an excellent way to keep track of artists you may not have heard of in your lifetime.  Hulme is a great example, a writer from New Zealand with some Maori blood, she was a surprise winner of the 1984 Booker Prize- surprising because The Bone People was published as a one off by a feminist collective in Auckland (I learned all this from her obituary.)  Hulme was also a trailblazer in terms of her gender identity- I'm pretty sure this is the first major literary prize winner with a protagonist who identifies as asexual.  Hulme herself was asexual, though such a term did not exist I think, when she was active.

   She is also a famous literary one-hit wonder, she never wrote another book after The Bone People (despite receiving hefty advances, something else I learned from the obituary.)  The Bone People does hold up over time- I found the story, about the mystery of an orphan rescued from a mysterious shipwreck, engaging both in terms of the characters and the larger plot revolving around the mystery of the child's parentage.  The Bone People shares much in common with the literary fiction of Native American indigenous writers- a combination of earthy wisdom and emotional dysfunction, albeit in the must gentler and less colonized clime of North Eastern New Zealand.