1980's Literature: 1987-1989
Kind of a downer after the past two time periods.
Published 3/8/17
Wittgenstein's Nephew (1988)
by Thomas Bernhard
German author Thomas Bernhard isn't a household name in America, but the editors of the 1001 Books list sure were big fans- five titles on the first edition, trimmed to three in the next. Wittgenstein's Nephew is one of the three keepers, probably because it's the only Bernhard novel where he displays anything like recognizable human emotion.
Like his other books, Wittgenstein's Nephew is a novella, not a novel- barely a hundred pages long. It tells the story of Bernhard himself, and his friendship with Paul Wittgenstein, nephew of the philosopher, both descended from the same Viennese industrialist family. Bernhard and Wittgenstein because both endure lengthy hospitalizations, Bernhard for a lung condition, and Wittgenstein for his madness. A major theme in Wittgenstein's Nephew is Bernhard's contention that Paul Wittgenstein's madness has a genius/artistic quality that elevates him among his wealthy kin. His book charts Wittgenstein's decline as he gives away his fortune and then faces repeated commitments for his outrageous public behavior.
Of course, Bernhard is a trenchant critic of bourgeois society, and his exaltation of Paul Wittgenstein is also his contempt for respectable Austrian society.
Published 4/10/17
The Enigma of Arrival (1987)
by V.S. Naipaul
Naipaul's status as the child of an East Indian immigrant who came to an English colony in the Caribbean on an island with a long history as a Spanish colony before it's take-over by the English. He is a kind of emblem of the British empire, with his DNA containing the entire story of the British conquest in the globe in the 18th and 19th century. Of course, Naipaul is aware of this history, but it is an inheritance that doesn't control Naipaul and his prose.
The Enigma of Arrival is an excellent example of the way Naipaul transcends his rich inheritance. A largely auto-biographical work of fiction that mostly takes place in Wiltshire, England, where Naipaul rented a cottage for several years to work on his writing, after he had made enough headway to afford to work full time on fiction.
Naipaul alternates between memories tied to his upbringing in Trinidad and subsequent emigration to England and the present of life in Wiltshire, where the decrepit estate which houses his rented cottage is slowly collapsing into ruin. His portraits of the characters in his little rural valley are so convincing that it is difficult to believe that is they who are the fictional element of The Enigma of Arrival. The close observation of his neighbors is like an inversion of colonialism, the coolie returned to England to get a good look at the sahib,
At the same time, Naipaul is well aware of the role that this Empire has had in his own education and his own present as someone who could afford to rent a cottage and write all day. One of the major themes in The Enigma of Arrival is the way that struggling to escape Trinidad shaped his subsequent experience outside of Trinidad.
The Enigma of Arrival (1987)
by V.S. Naipaul
Naipaul's status as the child of an East Indian immigrant who came to an English colony in the Caribbean on an island with a long history as a Spanish colony before it's take-over by the English. He is a kind of emblem of the British empire, with his DNA containing the entire story of the British conquest in the globe in the 18th and 19th century. Of course, Naipaul is aware of this history, but it is an inheritance that doesn't control Naipaul and his prose.
The Enigma of Arrival is an excellent example of the way Naipaul transcends his rich inheritance. A largely auto-biographical work of fiction that mostly takes place in Wiltshire, England, where Naipaul rented a cottage for several years to work on his writing, after he had made enough headway to afford to work full time on fiction.
Naipaul alternates between memories tied to his upbringing in Trinidad and subsequent emigration to England and the present of life in Wiltshire, where the decrepit estate which houses his rented cottage is slowly collapsing into ruin. His portraits of the characters in his little rural valley are so convincing that it is difficult to believe that is they who are the fictional element of The Enigma of Arrival. The close observation of his neighbors is like an inversion of colonialism, the coolie returned to England to get a good look at the sahib,
At the same time, Naipaul is well aware of the role that this Empire has had in his own education and his own present as someone who could afford to rent a cottage and write all day. One of the major themes in The Enigma of Arrival is the way that struggling to escape Trinidad shaped his subsequent experience outside of Trinidad.
Published 4/12/17
Matigari (1987)
by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o
Kenyan author Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o famously abandoned writing in English in favor of developing a literature in his native language, Gikuyu. Writing a foreword while in exile from Kenya, Thiong'o wryly notes that the Gikuyu language version was banned inside Kenya for years, but that the English translation could still be purchased while the Gikuyu language version was samizdat.
Matigari is a creation myth, the eponymous hero an allegory of the people who fought for independence but were betrayed by post-independence elites. Matigari, despite it's allegorical form, is a direct attack on the corruption of the post-independence Kenyan elite. They are a group that are often singled out for criticism in Thiong'o's fiction. Thiong'o's style is like the obverse of magical realism, non-magical fantasy. The symbolic children of Matigari earn a living picking out garbage from the dump.
Published 4/18/17
Beloved (1987)by Toni Morrison
I think any process of canonization which includes works within the last 30 years is suspects. 30 years of consideration should be the rule before any specific work of art is included in any canonical collection. Before 30 years have elapsed, you really don't have a feel for the true impact of a work of art, particularly for those works which were commercially but not critically appreciated, or vice versa. Its possible that there are books out there which were written in 1987 that the editors of the 1001 Books list were not aware of when they made the first edition of this list in 2006.
The core collection of 1001 Books is 700 titles. Chronologically speaking, 1987 is probably the cut off for that 700 number if you start from the beginning of time. I would guess that the 300 replaced titles are disproportionately located in the 300 books that remain between 1987 and the 2006 cut off for the first book. In 2006, they had no idea which books published in 2005 might qualify, and so how can they know which books might have to be replaced?
I'm bringing this up because I would argue that Beloved, Morrison's 1987 gothic shocker, is a keeper- an obvious inclusion within the core list of 700 books. Just to compare her to the other 1987 American authors that made the first edition of the 1001 Books list, you've got The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe, the collected New York Trilogy by Paul Auster (collected in one edition in 1987) and the Black Dahila by James Ellroy. Looking at a list of those four entries, and I would cut all of them BUT Beloved. I understand why the other titles have made it: The Bonfire of the Vanities was a cross-platform phenomenon for a mildly "important" author, Black Dahila is a stand out of 80's genre fiction and New York Trilogy is a clever work of metafiction.
Beloved, on the other hand, is an important book, Morrison has stood accused of overwrought, feverish prose, but who are we to quibble with the style when the results are so august? When Beloved was published, Morrison was at the top of her game, deploying elements of style to induce deeply felt emotions in the reader.
Published 4/19/17
World's End (1987)
by T.C. Boyle
T.C, Boyle is incredibly prolific for a "serious" novelist. Since the first edition of 1001 Books to Read Before You Die was published in 2006, Boyle has published five stand alone novels, each of which has remained in print in an evergreen paperback edition. The editorial language in the listing for this book in 1001 Books calls it Boyle's masterpiece, but without having read any of his other books (Road to Wellsville, anyone?) it seems like there is at least a chance that one of his subsequent novel deserves to replace World's End, which, in my mind, has aged badly, even since the 2006 publication date of the first 1001 Books.
Set among several generations of the population of the Hudson River Valley in three different time periods: The late 17th century, the period surrounding the second World War and the "high 1960's." With the exception of the portion set in the 17th century, Boyle is walking in a well trodden meadow. One book it recalls in particular is The Book of Daniel by E.L. Doctorow, published in 1971, which also uses The Peetskill Riots as a major plot point. Those riots were nativist/anti-communist protests of a Peace Concert in the Hudson River Valley by Paul Roebeson. Like a Woodstock, that was very much ahead of it's time.
And while there is nothing wrong with two works of 20th century American Fiction that focus on the Peetskill Riots as being emblematic of the American experience in the 1940's, I thought that Boyle's use of Native American characters bordered on the insulting. There are some subjects where a wry meta-fictional touch isn't appropriate, and personally, I don't see the Native American soft genocide as a topic for a comic novel. It is different for a writer who is actually Native America- Sherman Alexie, for example, an excellent Native American author who is very funny and not represented on the 1001 Books list.
It is easy to defend Boyle by saying that he treats his Native American (or part Native American) characters with the same sense of wry detachment that he uses for all his characters, but its hard to imagine him treating enslaved African American characters- who do appear in cameo roles in World's End, with the same attitude. As it stands, World's End is the first novel that really even discusses the Native American experience in North America- surely a rich vein of literature. A Sherman Alexie book at the least. Since World's End is Boyle's only core title, it would mean dropping him entirely. Maybe that isn't fair to Boyle, because World's End is only partially about Native American subjects.
And, if you are going to start directly comparing books at this point in time- 1987, it's easy for me to say that, a book like Beloved would be one of maybe two or three books to remain on the list, were space needed for new titles. Whats interesting about the core list is that you've got 700 titles, but those 700 all remained through 2010 and 2012, while the 300 books that were added to the list in 2008 were, I think, replaced entirely in 2012. In other words, none of the 300 replacement books in 2008 remained after the 2012 revision. You might also drop The Book of Daniel, since Doctorow has multiple titles on the core list.
Published 4/21/17
Pigeon (1987)
by Patrick Suskind
Pigeon is a little existential novella about a lonely Parisian security guard. He's been living in the same tiny walk-up flat for the better part of four decades when his routine is upset...by a pigeon, incongruously located in the hallway outside. Like his other 1001 Books entry, Perfume, there is ample evidence of Suskind's skill as a prose stylist, even in translation. Unlike Perfume, Pigeon is not story dwelling. The obsessive protagonist resembles various narrators in the novels of Thomas Bernhard, minus the self-conscious intellectualism.
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| The real life murder of Elizabeth Short AKA the Black Dahila, is the basis for the 1987 James Ellroy novel of the same name. |
The Black Dahlia (1987)
by James Ellroy
The Black Dahlia was a real murder case- of Elizabeth Short, in Los Angeles, in 1947. The notoriety of the case extended to the realm of fiction, where it became a kind of short-hand for neo-noir. James Ellroy was not the first or last author to write a fictionalized version of the case, which has remained formally unsolved (although informally the physician George Hodel is considered to be the murderer.) but his version is considered the best, even withstanding a disastrous Brian De Palma movie version to remain not just a certified platinum neo noir classic, but also one of those rare titles which elevated an author from "genre" to "serious" literature after publication.
That elevation is almost always a combination of popular and critical acclaim, as was the case with The Black Dahila. In his book, Ellroy successfully uses the Dahila murder as a metaphor for the decay, decadence and spiritual rot that has always existed at the heart of Anglo Los Angeles: an unholy combination of entertainment industry executives, real estate developers, racketeers and police that colluded to run the city for decades.
That combination of nefarious forces is synonymous both with our historical understanding of Los Angeles and it's heavy representation in the field of neo-noir literature. In 2017, largely as a result of the success of The Black Dahlia and the other three books in his L.A. Quartet really serve as the state of the art in this field, even decades after publication.
Published 4/26/17
Cigarettes (1987)
by Harry Mathews
I don't think the editors of the 1001 Books list eliminated many authors who only placed a single title on the initial list. Rather, I think most of the 300 books that got cut in 2008 were authors with two or more titles. Cigarettes is the only title for American author Harry Mathews- he was also the best known (only?) American representative of the Oulipo movement, a Paris-based group of writers who were interested in applying specific restraints to the writing process. It's a movement that has been more directly influential in Europe- you can think of the Lars Von Trier producing/Harmony Korine associated Dogme 95 movement, for one. You can also consider the restraint driven work of multi-platform American artist Matthew Barney.
In Cigarettes, Mathews undertakes the telling of a more or less conventional multi-generational family drama set in 1960's New York City and environs, but tells it by making each chapter about a single relationship between two characters. Some of the characters reappear in subseqeunt chapters, but never the same pair. So it's, father/daughter, daughter/lover father/father of second family, mother/son, etc. Within the chapters there is less experimentalism, with Mathews prose echoing other New York centered authors from the 1980's. Mathews also sets his characters against the back drop of the growth of the re-insurance industry in New York City.
Re-insurance is when a company buys a valid insurance claim from a disaster victim- warehouse fire, ship sinking in a storm, etc, and then exploits the claim for maximum value making a profit on the difference between what they pay the disaster victim and what the insurance company pays them. Mathews also touches on the lives of artist, intellectuals and gay culture. It is, in other words, a familiar blend of materials.
Published 4/26/17
The Child in Time (1987)
by Ian McEwan
McEwan placed an ASTONISHING number of titles on the first edition of the 1001 Books list: 8! Five of them were dropped in 2008. Another title was dropped in 2010, leaving him with only two core titles: Atonement (his biggest hit) and The Cement Garden (his first novel.) McEwan is an author I've always had an attitude about- I've never read Atonement, never read Amsterdam, never seen any of the movies, would laugh at someone who expressed appreciation for his talents- typical hipster bullship attitude stuff. But I was impressed by The Cement Garden- which is spoooky as hell, and this book- The Child in Time- which is his breakthrough in terms of his- I think- characteristic ability to warp the workings of time and space. I think that's where he's headed in his big monster hits, though I can't quite be sure.
It's true that your author's from the 1980's who combine critical and popular success tend to couple solid, if uninspired technique with power packed twists, much in the same way a movie works to develop suspense. Here, McEwan starts with a horrifying event: the abduction of a 3 year old child from a grocery store check out counter in London, and traces it's impact on the life of the father, the protagonist, and his wife and family. The Child in Time obviously lacks the immense swagger of his later blockbusters, but all the elements are there.
But losing six out of eight original titles- would clearer evidence could one have of the extremely arbitrary and biased process of canon making exercise. "Yes, let's include eight books from a guy who literally everyone who buys this book will have already heard of, because he's popular right as we are publishing this book- that's a good idea."
Published 4/28/17
The Afternoon of a Writer (1987)
by Peter Handke
It's hard not to compare The Afternoon of a Writer, A German language novella about an isolated and obsessed intellectual, with the contemporaneous work of Thomas Bernhard, another German language writer who writes novella's about obsessed and isolated intellectuals. Nearly all of the German language works on the 1001 Books list from this time period can be described the same way.
Unlike Bernhard's protagonist, Handke's writer can pass for normal, he is alone as part of his writing process, and The Afternoon of a Writer is notable largely for the insight that Handke brings to that lonely world.
The Afternoon of a Writer (1987)
by Peter Handke
It's hard not to compare The Afternoon of a Writer, A German language novella about an isolated and obsessed intellectual, with the contemporaneous work of Thomas Bernhard, another German language writer who writes novella's about obsessed and isolated intellectuals. Nearly all of the German language works on the 1001 Books list from this time period can be described the same way.
Unlike Bernhard's protagonist, Handke's writer can pass for normal, he is alone as part of his writing process, and The Afternoon of a Writer is notable largely for the insight that Handke brings to that lonely world.
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| Cover art from the 1988 Culture novel, The Player of Games, by Iain M. Banks. |
Published 5/2/17
The Player of Games (1988)
by Iain M. Banks
Scottish author Iain Banks wrote non-genre fiction without his middle initial. For his genre work, mostly science-fiction/fantasy, he went by Iain M. Banks, as is the case for The Player of Games, his second book in his sequence of titles about "The Culture" a far-future, post-scarcity civilization of humans, humanoids and sentient artificial intelligence (mostly represented by Droids and intelligent space ships in this volume) who... well it's not exactly sure what the Culture are actually up to, since their money-free, law-free anarchistic society doesn't appear to have any formal or informal goals, but they seem to be a force for what one might call "good."
Banks doesn't go in for a lot of exposition- a major point among works of genre fiction that got included in the first version of the 1001 Books list (The Player of Games was cut in 2008.) Jurneau Gurgah is the game player in question. He lives on some kind of floating asteroid designed to look like a Nordic fjord-scape. He travels the galaxy playing games as a representative of The Culture, but at the start of the book he is in full recluse mode. The games that he plays appear to be board games. I was a tad surprised that it was the humble board game which extends to all galaxies and civilizations, but there you have it.
In The Player of Games, Gurgah is recruited, under highly mysterious circumstances, to travel to the Azad Empire and take part in their civilization defining game (called Azad- the Empire being named after the game.) It's the kind of game where winning means you get to be the Emperor, and the Azadis take it very seriously. Compared to the Culture, the Azad are very uncool- they have three genders, and the Apex gender treats men and women as slaves, basically. The Azad are also low key into torture and rape, and they generally resemble what the worst in humanity might look like as a galactic empire.
For my money, the most interesting part of the Culture universe Banks has dreamed up is the presence of sentient artificial intelligence as co-partners- not servants of the Culture. How we treat sentient artificial intelligence is likely to be a major issue in the coming decades, and Banks is one of the first authors to take such an idea seriously- beyond the level of analysis first advanced by Mary Shelly in Frankenstein.
The Player of Games (1988)
by Iain M. Banks
Scottish author Iain Banks wrote non-genre fiction without his middle initial. For his genre work, mostly science-fiction/fantasy, he went by Iain M. Banks, as is the case for The Player of Games, his second book in his sequence of titles about "The Culture" a far-future, post-scarcity civilization of humans, humanoids and sentient artificial intelligence (mostly represented by Droids and intelligent space ships in this volume) who... well it's not exactly sure what the Culture are actually up to, since their money-free, law-free anarchistic society doesn't appear to have any formal or informal goals, but they seem to be a force for what one might call "good."
Banks doesn't go in for a lot of exposition- a major point among works of genre fiction that got included in the first version of the 1001 Books list (The Player of Games was cut in 2008.) Jurneau Gurgah is the game player in question. He lives on some kind of floating asteroid designed to look like a Nordic fjord-scape. He travels the galaxy playing games as a representative of The Culture, but at the start of the book he is in full recluse mode. The games that he plays appear to be board games. I was a tad surprised that it was the humble board game which extends to all galaxies and civilizations, but there you have it.
In The Player of Games, Gurgah is recruited, under highly mysterious circumstances, to travel to the Azad Empire and take part in their civilization defining game (called Azad- the Empire being named after the game.) It's the kind of game where winning means you get to be the Emperor, and the Azadis take it very seriously. Compared to the Culture, the Azad are very uncool- they have three genders, and the Apex gender treats men and women as slaves, basically. The Azad are also low key into torture and rape, and they generally resemble what the worst in humanity might look like as a galactic empire.
For my money, the most interesting part of the Culture universe Banks has dreamed up is the presence of sentient artificial intelligence as co-partners- not servants of the Culture. How we treat sentient artificial intelligence is likely to be a major issue in the coming decades, and Banks is one of the first authors to take such an idea seriously- beyond the level of analysis first advanced by Mary Shelly in Frankenstein.
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| The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster remains relevant and in print- pictured above is an Art Speigelman drawn cover sequence for a recent re-print. |
Published 5/2/17
The New York Trilogy (1987)
by Paul Auster
The New York Trilogy is a collection of three "post-modern detective fiction" novellas, originally written and published separately in 1985 and 1986. There is a limited overlap of characters, but the three novellas are not three separate stories about the same detective, a la Sherlock Holmes. Rather they are three novellas that are thematically similar in that they blend elements of detective fiction with elements of the post-modern philosophical novel that is more often associated with French and German authors in this time period. In any time period, ha ha.
Although Auster was never part of my literary experience, I recognize that The New York Trilogy was and is popular, but I didn't find The New York Trilogy to be earth shattering work. It may not even be the best book about an existenalist influenced detective to be published in 1987, because that is the same year that Douglas Adams published Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency.
I'm sure these would have made a bigger impression if I'd read them closer to the original publication date, but 30 years later it just seems like one of any number of self consciously existentialist detective novels.
The New York Trilogy (1987)
by Paul Auster
The New York Trilogy is a collection of three "post-modern detective fiction" novellas, originally written and published separately in 1985 and 1986. There is a limited overlap of characters, but the three novellas are not three separate stories about the same detective, a la Sherlock Holmes. Rather they are three novellas that are thematically similar in that they blend elements of detective fiction with elements of the post-modern philosophical novel that is more often associated with French and German authors in this time period. In any time period, ha ha.
Although Auster was never part of my literary experience, I recognize that The New York Trilogy was and is popular, but I didn't find The New York Trilogy to be earth shattering work. It may not even be the best book about an existenalist influenced detective to be published in 1987, because that is the same year that Douglas Adams published Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency.
I'm sure these would have made a bigger impression if I'd read them closer to the original publication date, but 30 years later it just seems like one of any number of self consciously existentialist detective novels.
Published 5/4/17
Libra (1988)
by Don DeLillo
Don DeLillo wasn't the first American novelist to take a recent historical event and rewrite it from the perspective of the actual historical actors. The Public Burning by Robert Coover, published in 1977, retells the story of the Julius and Ethyl Rosenberg Russian spying case from the perspective of then Vice-President Richard Nixon. Libra is a re-telling of the assassination of JFK, from the perspective of assassin Lee Harvey Oswald and a colorful cast of characters. DeLillo deserves recognition for the genius of selecting the JFK assassination as his subject. No single historical event of the last half century has generated more fevered speculation among weirdos and obsessives than JFK's assassination and the resulting investigation. To recap what you may or may not remember from your most recent brush with this story:
Lee Harvey Oswald shot JFK from the sixth floor window of the Texas Book Depository. The Warren Commission determined that Oswald acted alone. Oswald was murdered shortly after his arrest by Jack Ruby, a Dallas business man. Many people have raised numerous questions about the "official" version of events, with key attention paid to whether there were multiple gunmen positioned the day JFK was killed, whether Oswald was led to act by government affiliates, particularly those responsible for the Bay of Pigs debacle in Cuba, what happened to Oswald in Russia when he defected, etc, etc, but most of the speculation is around the "fact" that Oswald acted alone.
The counter-fact, that Oswald DID NOT act alone, is accepted as truth by three quarters of the United States population. (GALLUP) In Libra, DeLillo firmly aligns himself with the community of doubters, drawing from the facts but giving them the kind of coloring that suggests that every potential participant in the JFK plot is a character from a Saul Bellow novel written in the fifties. Some of that similarity may come from the fact that many of the Dallas and New Orleans based characters in Libra come from Chicago and left in the 1950's.
The greatest irony surrounding Libra is that for a majority of Americans, it is Libra which is closer to the truth of "what happened" to JFK than the exhaustively researched and publicly assembled Warren Report.
Libra (1988)
by Don DeLillo
Don DeLillo wasn't the first American novelist to take a recent historical event and rewrite it from the perspective of the actual historical actors. The Public Burning by Robert Coover, published in 1977, retells the story of the Julius and Ethyl Rosenberg Russian spying case from the perspective of then Vice-President Richard Nixon. Libra is a re-telling of the assassination of JFK, from the perspective of assassin Lee Harvey Oswald and a colorful cast of characters. DeLillo deserves recognition for the genius of selecting the JFK assassination as his subject. No single historical event of the last half century has generated more fevered speculation among weirdos and obsessives than JFK's assassination and the resulting investigation. To recap what you may or may not remember from your most recent brush with this story:
Lee Harvey Oswald shot JFK from the sixth floor window of the Texas Book Depository. The Warren Commission determined that Oswald acted alone. Oswald was murdered shortly after his arrest by Jack Ruby, a Dallas business man. Many people have raised numerous questions about the "official" version of events, with key attention paid to whether there were multiple gunmen positioned the day JFK was killed, whether Oswald was led to act by government affiliates, particularly those responsible for the Bay of Pigs debacle in Cuba, what happened to Oswald in Russia when he defected, etc, etc, but most of the speculation is around the "fact" that Oswald acted alone.
The counter-fact, that Oswald DID NOT act alone, is accepted as truth by three quarters of the United States population. (GALLUP) In Libra, DeLillo firmly aligns himself with the community of doubters, drawing from the facts but giving them the kind of coloring that suggests that every potential participant in the JFK plot is a character from a Saul Bellow novel written in the fifties. Some of that similarity may come from the fact that many of the Dallas and New Orleans based characters in Libra come from Chicago and left in the 1950's.
The greatest irony surrounding Libra is that for a majority of Americans, it is Libra which is closer to the truth of "what happened" to JFK than the exhaustively researched and publicly assembled Warren Report.
Published 5/4/17
The Passion (1987)
by Jeanette Winterson
The Passion is what Canadian literary theorist Linda Hutcheson first called, "Historiographic meta-fiction" around the time it was published. This category contains many of the novels published between 1970 and the present that have garnered both serious critical and large popular audiences. Writers who can be plausibly included as having works in this category are like a who's who of mid to late 20th century fiction: Peter Ackroyd, Isabelle Allende, Robert Coover, Don DeLillo, E.L. Doctorow, Umberto Eco, John Fowles, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Thomas Pynchon, Salman Rushdie, Neal Stephenson and Kurt Vonnegut all fit the description first provided by Hutcheson.
These books are both self-reflexive and concerned with "real" historical events and characters. Unlike many of the other authors represented in a survey of historiographic metafiction, Winterson is a queer woman, so that makes The Passion different. It is a tale of two losers caught up in the seismic shifts of Napoleonic Europe: The French army enlistee from the bucolic French countryside and the web-toed, canal-wise Venetian red head, daughter of a boatman, who makes her way in the world as a croupier, pick pocket and occasional prostitute. Her amoral adventures are presented matter-of-factly without lingering or moralizing. The two stories are told separately and become intertwined in the disastrous aftermath of the French invasion of Russia, when the two flee together to Venice.
And while The Passion certainly qualifies as reflexive and self-aware, it is not a difficult read- unlike, say, Nights at the Circus, with which it shares some similarities.
Published 5/9/17
The Beautiful Room is Empty (1988)
by Edmund White
The coming-of-age stories of the LGBT spectrum are one of the limited areas where a "coming of age" novel can hope to bring something new to the table by the end of the 20th century. Coming-of-age tales are contained by the formalism of the genre: first person narration by a character who closely resembles the author. Edmund White represents the bleeding edge of the LGBT wave: A white male, not particularly effeminate nor trans, from a privileged economic upbringing, with a very good education and a prestigious job in New York City as an editor. The Beautiful Room is Empty is the second of his cis gay coming of age trilogy- this chapter covers the events from college until the Stonewall riots, which the author/narrator character takes part in.
In 2017 there is nothing particularly revelatory in the terrain covered by White in The Beautiful Room is Empty- in the first novel- the best parts concern his becoming aware of his sexuality in the relative isolation of Cincinnati. By the time he gets to New York City and pre-Stonewall Greenwich village, he is documenting a scene that is well known to all with even a casual interest in social equality
White writes frankly about gay male sex, oral and anal, describing intimately such milleus as the Port Authority bathroom-which sounds like a virtual bachinallia of sucking and fucking (I'm just being descriptive) and the gendered practices of gay love making in pre-AIDS New York City. Perhaps the most lasting importance of The Beautiful Room is Empty is to give a portrait-in-time of pre-AIDS New York City- a virtual Weimar Republic before the onset of AIDS terror.
Published 5/9/17
The Satanic Verses (1988)
by Salman Rushdie
I am now convinced that Salman Rushdie is the best novelist of his generation, maybe the best novelist of the 20th century and certainly one of the top 5 novelists of all time, alongside writers like Daniel DeFoe, Charles Dickens, James Joyce and Marcel Proust. Before I started the 1001 Books project, the Rushdie slot would have been taken by a writer like Thomas Pynchon or maybe David Foster Wallace, but I have no doubt that Rushdie leaves Pynchon in the dust. Rushdie's protean ability to absorb almost every aspect of the western AND eastern literary tradition within a single work is remarkable. There is enough to unpack in each of his novels to keep people interested for decades in unraveling it all. At the same time, his work is never over complicated or technical to the point of being obscure. His books traffic in the kind of universal human emotions, love, hate, anger, that people want to read about.
Of course, The Satanic Verses is best known for provoking the Iranian government-clergy to pronounce a fatwa against Rushdie soon after the book was published. The reasoning behind the fatwa is obscure but not that obscure. The title of the book refers to an actual "incident" that happened during the life of the prophet Mohammed. Basically, it was a time before Mecca (or really anywhere) had converted to Islam. Medina was a city that had temples and shrines to many deities, standard in the ancient world at that time. Mohammed was offered control of the city, provided he acknowledge three female deities. He agreed, only to later say that he had been deceived by the devil, who had interposed himself between Mohammed and his angel-contact. The verses he recited justifying his decision to acknowledge the three female deities, a clear violation of the Islamic adherence to monotheism, are known as the "Satanic Verses."
These verses were part of the canonical tradition for several centuries, but were eventually stripped out both for technical reasons and reasons having to do with the doubt it placed in the idea that Mohammed was infallible. Salman Rushdie, provoked the Shi'a clergy of Iran in the much the same way the Catholic Church would be provoked if one wrote a book about Jesus having sex with Mary Magdalene. Obviously minus the fatwa.
This rich historical background is just a single strand of the multi-layered plot, which interweaves fantasy, science fiction, post-colonial literature, posts-modern literature and the tradition of the 20th century English domestic novel into a rich tapestry. Like many works of genius, description lessens the impact, but I would like to say that The Satanic Verses is not nearly as difficult to read as one might expec from it's reputation, and it is, in fact, a good deal of fun.
Published 5/15/17
Wittgenstein's Mistress (1988)
by David Markson
Two things you need to know about Wittgenstein's Mistress:
1. It is an experimental novel, in exactly the same way as many of Samuel Beckett's novels.
2. David Foster Wallace was a huge fan, and an essay he wrote on the genius of Wittgenstein's Mistress is appended to the 2012 paperback edition.
Kate, the narrator, claims to be the last person on earth, and Wittgenstein's Mistress consists of her disconnected ruminations on a variety of subjects related to her personal history and art. As DFW points out, repeatedly, in his essay, Wittgenstein's Mistress is like a literary representation of Wittgenstein's early philosophy, as expressed in his later disavowed, Tractaus Logico-Philosophicus.
At this point, it would be appropriate to maybe get into some of the analysis that DFW provides regarding the relationship between Wittgenstein, his Tractaus Logico-Philosphicus and the text of Wittgenstein's Mistress, but I think it would all be tedious, and I simply can't imagine a reader who would be interested, except the person who +1's all of the experimental fiction reviews on the Google Plus network. Shout out to that person! Or bot! I'm fine if bots want to read this blog as well. All hail our robot overlords, that's what I say.
Published 5/16/17
The Book of Evidence (1989)
by John Banville
I would hope, by the time I made into the 1980's section of the 1001 Books list, that I would have at least heard of all of the major authors. He actually won the Booker Prize in 2005 for The Sea, which is the year before I started this project. So here I am, 2017, learning about Irish author for the first time, via an Everyman's Library dual publication of The Book of Evidence and The Sea. It's embarrassing, but it probably is evidence that Banville hasn't really crossed the Atlantic ocean in any substantial way. I can understand it- the authors that John Banville draws comparisons to: Nabokov, Proust and James Joyce, all come from the stylish/experimental side of the novel family tree.
Banville is on record saying he wants to bring the same depth of experience to prose that one experiences from reading poetry. The Book of Evidence, which itself was short-listed for the Booker Prize, is a dark tale featuring a highly unreliable narrator, Freddy Montgomery, a classic existential anti-hero who narrates The Book of Evidence from an Irish prison cell, where he awaits sentencing for his senseless murder of a house maid in the course of even more senseless attempt to steal a 16th century painting from the estate of some family friends.
Calling ole Freddy an "unreliable narrator" gets to the heart of what The Book of Evidence is "about" in a serious-critical sense. Montgomery is writing out what he imagines to be his testimony in his upcoming trial- a trial that will never occur. He addresses the Judge of his case and repeatedly observes that it is unclear which parts of his tale are true and un-true. Since one imagines that untruth in this context would involve making one look better in front of the Court, it comes as surprise that Montgomery's own recollections could hardly be less flattering.
The portrait that emerges is a man who is as close to unredeemable as exists in modern literature. That his redemption never arrives won't surprise anyone familiar with serious literature. At the same time, The Book of Evidence is a beautiful book, and Banville is an excellent writer. He's worth looking up.
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| Amber Heard plays Nikki Six in the hugely ill fated movie version of London Fields, the 1989 novel written by Martin Amis. |
Published 5/20/17
London Fields (1989)
by Martin Amis
Fair to say the work of Martin Amis evokes both strong positive and negative reaction- then and now. I have often said- to artists in personal conversation that this is a universal characteristic of great art, art that lasts the decades, stands the test of time- you know GREAT ART. Love AND Hate, Beauty AND Squalor. That's another maxim I mutter- to myself only- walking the streets of Los Angeles and Beverly Hills, Orange County and San Bernardino: The ugliness is a part of beauty. Beauty contains both attributes- beauty and ugliness, because it is individual to the viewer. If one person can say something is great, another can say it is terrible, and the observed work is both.
London Fields is an exemplar of beautifully ugly fiction- another example would be American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis, Bright Lights, Big City is another example- and Amis' other books. Billed as a murder mystery written in reverse, Amis indulges in the kind of viruoso post-modern maneuvering that will surely characterize the generation of writers including Amis and those that follow. The unreliable narrator isn't a technique deployed to generate interest in readers of 19th century periodicals, it is a literary device that, by 1989, had already been analyzed to death. The unreliable narrator means something, or maybe it means nothing, but you can see novelists- not just Amis- struggling with the very fibers of what a novel "is' even as they achieve dazzling heights in the field.
Contrast these post modern antics to the more conventional coming of age type narratives that emerged from new sources: LGBT authors, African and Latin American authors. At the same time, the mainline of Anglo-American fiction shifted away from more conventional set ups (marriage, relationships, families) and begins to deploy of tool box of tips and tricks developed by successful writers who also became successful teachers and theorists of writing.
London Fields is also a good early example of another trend of 1980's literature- the emergence of the "Brick" -a 400 to 600 page work of "serious" fiction. Amis is himself a pioneer of this style of book publication, Salman Rushdie, Don DeLillo (not quite there yet in his 80's books), The Bonfire of the Vanities. As such he is somewhat responsible for a line that runs right up to today. London Fields, written in 1989, is clearly contemporary fiction- 30 some-odd years on.
Published 5/26/17
Cat's Eye (1988)
by Margaret Atwood
I did not have much appetite for a 400 page story about a (female) painter coming to terms with her past on the eve of her first Toronto area career retrospective. That said, Atwood won me over with her (stop me if you've heard this before) crisp observations about the relationships between men and women, career and family, art and commerce. And while the present for painter Elaine Risley is a familiar blend of musings about the art world,ex-husbands and children, the past is a more Gothic place. Much of the early reminisces of Risley concern her ill treatment by a troika of classmates. Later, her chief antagonist/tormentor emerges as her high school bff. After that, she is witness to her friend's long decline and failure as an adult.
It is far from clear that Cordelia, the tormentor in chief and high school bff will emerge in the later part of Cat's Eye, but I feel it is that relationship, rather than Elaine's emotional/sexual relationships with men, that defines the reader experience.
Published 5/30/17
A Prayer for Owen Meany (1989)
by John Irving
A Prayer for Owen Meany is one of those "popular, critically acclaimed artist at the top of their game" releases that is well received upon release, but ages badly. The aging process was not helped by a movie version that was so bad that Irving forced the makers to rename the film (Simon Birch). In 2017, reading A Prayer for Owen Meany was a tedious experience. First of all, it's something like 650 pages long- well over a thousand pages in the large print edition I accidentally checked out from the library. Despite being 650 pages long, Owen Meany doesn't cover a whole lot of territory- basically it discusses the friendship between John Wheelwright, the mini-scion of a regionally important Maine family, and his dwarf-like best friend, Owen Meany.
A Prayer for Owen Meany is about a lot of things: friendship, religion, family tragedy, New England private school education, the Vietnam War and the Reagan era Iran Contra shenanigans. Narrated from a present where Wheelwright is teaching girls school in Canada, a forty year old version, he recounts the shared life of himself and Meany through Meany's untimely demise (not a spoiler, Wheelwright makes clear in the first chapter that Meany has been deceased for some time).
Irving is nothing if not consistent, if you wanted to change the names around you could almost put The World According to Garp, Cider House Rules and this book in order and call it one book. Personally, I don't think that Irving is going to a canonical author a century for now. His books just aren't arty enough and they are long, long, long. His milieu, that of straight white men from New England coming of age in the mid 20th century, are highly unlikely to evoke the kind of revival interest among academics of the kind sparked by representatives of less familiar groups, none of the movie versions have made it to "classic" status. No one is ever going to that John Irving is "cool" ever again.
The main argument for Irving's canonical inclusion is his continued popularity with a mass audience. As I'm writing this, the most recent edition of this book is a top 5000 Amazon title, followed closely by Cider House and Garp. John Irving is still being read, in other words, and an author who combines critical and popular acclaim is likely to stay canonical as long as said works continue to be purchased by a large audience.
A Prayer for Owen Meany (1989)
by John Irving
A Prayer for Owen Meany is one of those "popular, critically acclaimed artist at the top of their game" releases that is well received upon release, but ages badly. The aging process was not helped by a movie version that was so bad that Irving forced the makers to rename the film (Simon Birch). In 2017, reading A Prayer for Owen Meany was a tedious experience. First of all, it's something like 650 pages long- well over a thousand pages in the large print edition I accidentally checked out from the library. Despite being 650 pages long, Owen Meany doesn't cover a whole lot of territory- basically it discusses the friendship between John Wheelwright, the mini-scion of a regionally important Maine family, and his dwarf-like best friend, Owen Meany.
A Prayer for Owen Meany is about a lot of things: friendship, religion, family tragedy, New England private school education, the Vietnam War and the Reagan era Iran Contra shenanigans. Narrated from a present where Wheelwright is teaching girls school in Canada, a forty year old version, he recounts the shared life of himself and Meany through Meany's untimely demise (not a spoiler, Wheelwright makes clear in the first chapter that Meany has been deceased for some time).
Irving is nothing if not consistent, if you wanted to change the names around you could almost put The World According to Garp, Cider House Rules and this book in order and call it one book. Personally, I don't think that Irving is going to a canonical author a century for now. His books just aren't arty enough and they are long, long, long. His milieu, that of straight white men from New England coming of age in the mid 20th century, are highly unlikely to evoke the kind of revival interest among academics of the kind sparked by representatives of less familiar groups, none of the movie versions have made it to "classic" status. No one is ever going to that John Irving is "cool" ever again.
The main argument for Irving's canonical inclusion is his continued popularity with a mass audience. As I'm writing this, the most recent edition of this book is a top 5000 Amazon title, followed closely by Cider House and Garp. John Irving is still being read, in other words, and an author who combines critical and popular acclaim is likely to stay canonical as long as said works continue to be purchased by a large audience.
Published 5/30/17
The Melancholy Resistance (1989)
by László Krasznahorkai
Krasznahorkai is the second Hungarian language author to make the 1001 Books list. The other author is Nobel Prize winner Imre Kertesz, so that makes Krasznahorkai the SECOND most famous Hungarian language novelist in English. Unlike Fatelessness, Kerteszs' straight forward Holocaust memoir, The Melancholy of Resistance is an avant-garde, paragraph-less fantasia about a nameless town plagued by a mysterious circus, a dead whale and a shadowy mob of hooligans. Did I mention that this book has no paragraphs?
Aside from the total lack of paragraphs- there are chapters, thank god, The Melancholy Resistance avoids any kind of signaling to the reader so that the story unspools "in real time."
Published 6/1/17
The Temple of My Familiar (1989)
by Alice Walker
There is a fairly typical, pan-artistic discipline career path followed by artists who achieve a significant combination of critical and popular success in the mid to late 20th century: The breakthrough work is typically conventional, but something that brings new life to the form. After that, the artist rebels against the early success. Musicians start side projects, or change their sound. Authors create pseudonyms or publish works that radically push against what is "acceptable" within the form at the time. Studio artists switch art forms or abandon successful themes. Continuing to mine the veins that brought you initial success is frowned upon among communities of successful artists.
The Temple of My Familiar is a good example of an author taking flight after publishing a career defining hit. The Temple of My Familiar contains a multitude of plots and characters, and delves deeply into past life and recovered memory theory, while containing characters of (almost) all races and genders. I wouldn't call it a masterpiece, but it is a very interesting book for those interested in the mind of Alice Walker. Walker was never "just" a novelist- her career spanned journalism and academia. Before she struck gold with The Color Purple, she almost single-handedly revived the memory of early African-American writer Zora Neale Hurston (she literally uncovered her unmarked grave in Florida.)
Walker also directly addresses the irrational hatred of whites by African Americans, though she attempts to explain it away by using recovered memory instead of copping to what is essentially a rational attitude for any African American (I don't agree with it, I just understand the why.
Published 6/8/17
A disaffection (1989)
by James Kelman
It's almost like a joke to complain about the over-representation of sexless white males in the precincts of "serious" literature. This book is one example. A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving, featuring a literal 40 year old virgin as a narrator, is another recent title which fits this description. I'm not a reader obsessed or repressed with sexual matter, but it seems to me that these sexless, white-male narrators are the fore-runners of the "Beta Male."
Scottish author James Kelman represents Glasgow on the world literary scene, and Glasgow stands for post-industrial urban decline (see the Glasgow Effect). He write in Glaswegian brogue, not as hard to understand as the dialect of Irving Welch, but noticeable. Patrick Doyle narrates A disaffection, he is a school teacher from a working class family, and the guy can not get laid. CAN NOT get laid. The book is about that problem, and Doyle's (sad) efforts to end it.
Sad 40 year old virgin, that is A disaffection by James Kelman.
Published 6/10/17
Billy Bathgate (1989)
by E.L. Doctorow
When a good book begets a terrible movie, what influence does that bad film have on the reputation of the book? Presumably, a terrible movie version will never help the long term reputation of the underlying book, it can only not impact the reputation of the book or negatively impact the reputation of the book. Billy Bathgate, published in 1989, was out in theaters in November of 1991, where it was a HUGE HUGE bomb: Budget: 48 million Box Office Revenue: 15 million.
Huge bomb. If the file came out in November of 1991, and the book was published in 1989, the film rights had either been pre-sold or were sold immediately after it was published. Billy Bathgate the book was a price winner, so it is fair to say that in November of 1991, it was still in paperback- in fact- it's safe to say that a "movie edition" of the paperback was in stores. So the movie comes out, and it's terrible- that surely must hurt the reputation of the book- because the film is named the same as the book, and many people who never heard of the book now know ONLY that it is a terrible movie.
Billy Bathgate is a fun, but by no means world-beating piece of historical fiction, about the titular character, who is a young boy coming of age in picturesque early twentieth century New York City. It's often categorized as a "post modern historical novel" (by Wikipedia, no less.) I have no idea why this book would be called post modern. What Billy Bathgate is, is a historical novel, written in 1989, by an author with two decade long track record of matching critical with popular success. Does that combination somehow render him post-modern? Honestly, I asked google about it, but couldn't come up with an easy answer.
Billy Bathgate (1989)
by E.L. Doctorow
When a good book begets a terrible movie, what influence does that bad film have on the reputation of the book? Presumably, a terrible movie version will never help the long term reputation of the underlying book, it can only not impact the reputation of the book or negatively impact the reputation of the book. Billy Bathgate, published in 1989, was out in theaters in November of 1991, where it was a HUGE HUGE bomb: Budget: 48 million Box Office Revenue: 15 million.
Huge bomb. If the file came out in November of 1991, and the book was published in 1989, the film rights had either been pre-sold or were sold immediately after it was published. Billy Bathgate the book was a price winner, so it is fair to say that in November of 1991, it was still in paperback- in fact- it's safe to say that a "movie edition" of the paperback was in stores. So the movie comes out, and it's terrible- that surely must hurt the reputation of the book- because the film is named the same as the book, and many people who never heard of the book now know ONLY that it is a terrible movie.
Billy Bathgate is a fun, but by no means world-beating piece of historical fiction, about the titular character, who is a young boy coming of age in picturesque early twentieth century New York City. It's often categorized as a "post modern historical novel" (by Wikipedia, no less.) I have no idea why this book would be called post modern. What Billy Bathgate is, is a historical novel, written in 1989, by an author with two decade long track record of matching critical with popular success. Does that combination somehow render him post-modern? Honestly, I asked google about it, but couldn't come up with an easy answer.
Published 6/21/17
Moon Palace (1989)
by Paul Auster
There is no denying that Paul Auster is still read, and that a generation of serious readers (in America, at least) have grown up with Auster's books readily available on the shelves of libraries and book stores everywhere. Beginning with his existential detective trilogy, Auster seems dedicated to intertwining the tradition of the 20th century European philosophical novel (Novels where nothing much happens) with the active plot mechanic of a writer who is very aware of the "state of the art" of fiction writing.
In short, he writes savvy, intellectual fiction with some commercial appeal. His characters very much reflect the dramatic self obsession which has grown to define our American culture, and his presence in the fictional precincts of New York City ensure that even his most failed characters have an aspirational side for readers of contemporary literature.
Moon Palace has an intricate plot for a 300 page long novel- the narrator, M. F. Fogg, is an orphan, raised by an uncle, an itinerant jazz musician. He attends Columbia University and descends into a "I would prefer not to" style of genteel poverty. He is rescued from his plight by Kitty Woo, a "manic pixie dream girl" from before that term was coined. Perhaps the brilliance of Moon Palace is contained in the fact that this description of the first act of the book provides no clue to the second and final act.
I'm not sure that Auster's book stand up to much discussion or description- the gossamer strands of his jewel box plotting means that even the barest description of events risks compromising the pleasures of the read. Not all fiction is like this- you can describe a work of experimental fiction- like Ulysses by James Joyce, without changing the wondrous impact of the prose itself.
Sexing the Cherry (1989)
by Jeanette Winterson
Jeanette Winterson is both a post-modernist and a Feminist (capital F.) Sexing the Cherry is her take on the "meta-historical" novel, though in her case it is more of meta-historical work of experimental fiction. Sexing the Cherry is the kind of novel where you feel compelled to say that the author "plays with" various ideas because it is not clear what he/she thinks about the characters, or what the characters think about themselves.
The fantastical elements of Sexing the Cherry align closely with the "freaks and geeks" sub-genre of 20th century literature. The protagonist is the Dog Woman, a giant freak of hideous visage. Their travels take place across time and space, with no explanations of the how or why.
Published 6/24/17
The Trick is to Keep Breathing (1989)
by Janice Galloway
Another sad book about sad 1980's Scotland, this one written by a woman instead of a man. Joy Stone is the narrator and main character- she teaches drama, she's a "drunkorexic" though she is also depressed, and she spends basically the entire book being sad and bemoaning her fate.
And although I see that sad white women need their own voice in literature, I also find these type of books pretty tedious. I've known plenty of sad white women- rich, poor- young, old- my whole life has been spent talking to sad white women bemoaning their fate. While I am sympathetic to the various problems that women face- I'm more sympathetic to those faced by women of color and women in the global south than the problems of women in wealthy industrial countries who are basically sad about a bunch of stuff because life sucks. I know life sucks. Everyone knows life sucks, that life isn't fair.
I mean, get over it, or I guess, don't get over it. I'm saying that in the full flower of understanding of the struggle faced by women like Joy Stone and her progeny. I'm sorry you are sad, I'm sorry you grapple with mental illness. It's terrible. Is it the only thing you are going to talk about for the rest of your entire life?
Published 8/9/17
Midnight Examiner (1989)
by William Kotzwinkle
It's hard to take seriously a writer whose greatest claim to fame is the novelization of the "E.T." movie, but that is the situation with Kotzwinkle, who hardly covers up the fact in his more traditional books- "writer of the best selling novel of 1982" his book jackets proclaim. I double checked to make sure that it was a novelization, and that Kotzwinkle hadn't written the underlying story that the film was based upon.
While it's not fair to call him "forgotten"- after all- he is still alive and has his own website, etc., it is fair to say that he is a surprise inclusion in the 1001 Books project. Based on Midnight Examiner, I still can't explain it entirely- he writes firmly in the 1960's American tradition of "wowee zowee," that shows influence from comic books an pulp fiction. Midnight Examiner is based on classic supermarket tabloids like Weekly World News, those that would simply fabricate a fantastic headline for the hell of it.
As I read Midnight Examiner, it did occur to me that this era was relevant to our own era of "fake news," but I'm not sure anyone is around who is reading Kotzwinkle to care. With his combination of quasi-serious fiction, genre fantasy/sci fi and popular novelizations of popular films, Kotzwinkle is kind of a real-life Kilgore Trout, the (fictional) muse of Kurt Vonnegut's many novels.
by Jeanette Winterson
Jeanette Winterson is both a post-modernist and a Feminist (capital F.) Sexing the Cherry is her take on the "meta-historical" novel, though in her case it is more of meta-historical work of experimental fiction. Sexing the Cherry is the kind of novel where you feel compelled to say that the author "plays with" various ideas because it is not clear what he/she thinks about the characters, or what the characters think about themselves.
The fantastical elements of Sexing the Cherry align closely with the "freaks and geeks" sub-genre of 20th century literature. The protagonist is the Dog Woman, a giant freak of hideous visage. Their travels take place across time and space, with no explanations of the how or why.
Published 6/24/17
The Trick is to Keep Breathing (1989)
by Janice Galloway
Another sad book about sad 1980's Scotland, this one written by a woman instead of a man. Joy Stone is the narrator and main character- she teaches drama, she's a "drunkorexic" though she is also depressed, and she spends basically the entire book being sad and bemoaning her fate.
And although I see that sad white women need their own voice in literature, I also find these type of books pretty tedious. I've known plenty of sad white women- rich, poor- young, old- my whole life has been spent talking to sad white women bemoaning their fate. While I am sympathetic to the various problems that women face- I'm more sympathetic to those faced by women of color and women in the global south than the problems of women in wealthy industrial countries who are basically sad about a bunch of stuff because life sucks. I know life sucks. Everyone knows life sucks, that life isn't fair.
I mean, get over it, or I guess, don't get over it. I'm saying that in the full flower of understanding of the struggle faced by women like Joy Stone and her progeny. I'm sorry you are sad, I'm sorry you grapple with mental illness. It's terrible. Is it the only thing you are going to talk about for the rest of your entire life?
Published 8/9/17
Midnight Examiner (1989)
by William Kotzwinkle
It's hard to take seriously a writer whose greatest claim to fame is the novelization of the "E.T." movie, but that is the situation with Kotzwinkle, who hardly covers up the fact in his more traditional books- "writer of the best selling novel of 1982" his book jackets proclaim. I double checked to make sure that it was a novelization, and that Kotzwinkle hadn't written the underlying story that the film was based upon.
While it's not fair to call him "forgotten"- after all- he is still alive and has his own website, etc., it is fair to say that he is a surprise inclusion in the 1001 Books project. Based on Midnight Examiner, I still can't explain it entirely- he writes firmly in the 1960's American tradition of "wowee zowee," that shows influence from comic books an pulp fiction. Midnight Examiner is based on classic supermarket tabloids like Weekly World News, those that would simply fabricate a fantastic headline for the hell of it.
As I read Midnight Examiner, it did occur to me that this era was relevant to our own era of "fake news," but I'm not sure anyone is around who is reading Kotzwinkle to care. With his combination of quasi-serious fiction, genre fantasy/sci fi and popular novelizations of popular films, Kotzwinkle is kind of a real-life Kilgore Trout, the (fictional) muse of Kurt Vonnegut's many novels.
Published 8/16/17
Oscar and Lucinda (1988)
by Peter Cary
The idea of describing a work of "serious' literature as, "An international best seller..film loved my millions..." was essentially unheard of up through the mid 1980's, but the emergence of film producers like Merchant-Ivory Productions an the Weinsteins ensured that any half way decent work of "serious"literature with a prize winning pedigree would be a solid candidate for a movie. Oscar and Lucinda won the 1988 Booker Prize, and the Ralph Fiennes/Cate Blanchett movie followed almost immediately.
Oscar and Lucinda, like many 1001 Books participants from this period in time, is a variation on "historical meta fiction," set in England and Australia in the early part of the 20th century. The nutshell of the plot, "Defrocked clergy man an wealthy female social outcast build a glass church and transport it through the Australian outback;" gives a decent idea of the plot, but doesn't adequately describe the "meta" part of the historical fiction description. The main "meta" aspect is an uncanny obsession with human psychology on the part of the narrator, giving a depth to the described events that would otherwise be lacking.
Oscar and Lucinda is also "about" the Anglican church in England and Australia in the early 20th century, gambling an the social mores of frontier society in Australia. Carey proves his Booker Prize winning merit in the final hundred pages of the 576 page book (it reads much shorter), which is a legit page turning ending, more like something you'd expect from genre fiction, but with a twist, of course.
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| Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson starred in the well known movie version of The Remains of the Day, the 1989 novel by Kazuo Ishiguro |
The Remains of the Day (1989)
by Kazuo Ishiguro
The Remains of the Day is a definite skip, probably just because the idea of the movie version- starring Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson, made me think that it was the kind of subject I wouldn't enjoy. It was a decision I made over a year ago, before Ishiguro won the Nobel Prize in Literature. When he won, I actually felt a twinge, knowing I had skipped The Remains of the Day, which is his break out novel, his one Booker Prize winner (four nominations). The movie version netted eight Oscar nominations in 1994, winning zero.
If you had to nutshell Ishiguro, you would have to focus on the extent to which all of his books explore memory and forgetfulness. He returns to the subject of unconscious forgetting again and again. Of course, this is a dominant theme as Stephens, the butler played by Hopkins in the movie, recalls past episodes in his life working for Lord Darlington, a fictional character who none the less bears a close resemblance to figures from the English establishment who took a pro-Nazi stance into World War II and were punished by history for their mistake.
Stephens gradually comes to doubt Lord Darlington, and the doubt arises in the midst of other recollections about the meaning of "dignity," his strained relationship with his father, also a butler, and most importantly his relationship with Miss Kenton (Emma Thompson in the film) which, it develops, represents a missed life opportunity for Stephens. The idea that memory is central to fiction in a crucial way is old- Proust, obviously, having crystallized memory as a fiction theme in Remembrance of Things Past. Memory is central to fiction even when it is not a theme at all- since almost all novels involve someone writing something down at a later date. The centuries old device of the "unreliable narrator" often implicates memory.
I think the case could be made that Ishiguro, with his emphasis on the complexity of human memory, has received a boost from contemporaneous interest in brain chemistry and the way memories are formed. The use of memory as a form of self deception also isn't unique to Ishiguro- a generation of post World War II German writers have returned repeatedly to the idea of conscious amnesia- but Ishiguro is the English language writer who has best anticipated the developments in the science of this area.
The Remains of the Day is still fresh in that regard, and despite a very time specific setting- England between the wars- there is a universality of the Stephens/Kenton dynamic that has obviously stood the test of time.
Published 3/8/18
The History of the Siege of Lisbon (1989)
by Jose Saramago
It was a big Nobel Prize in Literature win for Jose Saramago in 1998, the first by a Portuguese writer, and of course, the kind of thing that can ensure solid English language canonical status for non-English writing authors. The History of the Siege of Lisbon was published in the original in 1989, the English translation came in 1996, so unlike many of his pre-Nobel Prize in Literature titles, it was translated into English before he won.
The History of the Siege of Lisbon is an incredibly verbose book, combining elements of Italo Calvino, Borges and Umberto Eco, about an interpreter who decides to rewrite the history of the siege of Lisbon by inserting a "NOT" into the sentence where the writer begins to describe the help of travelling Crusaders for the Portuguese attackers.
Raimundo Silva, the interpreter-protagonist thinks in ornate, multi-clause sentences that confound reader attempts to keep track of all but the most basic gist of the plot. As he wanders around Lisbon, he seeks to actually conjure up his alternate history in the landscape, and he also grapples with what might be called "woman issues."
Other than the density of the language, much of The History of the Siege of Lisbon presents the familiar scenario of a European novelist writing about a character who has trouble deciding what to do. That's almost every European novel- some man dithering.
Published 4/23/18
Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (1987)
by Douglas Adams
In Junior High, Douglas Adams was one of my favorite authors, specifically, the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy was a threshold title between Young Adult/Genre Fiction and the headier world of literature. In my own experience, Adams preceded the Beats and Herman Hesse, and his treatment of philosophical issues, humorous though they might be, spurred my own interest in, "Life, The Universe and Everything"
I remember the paperback copy of Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency. I can still remember the cover art from the decade plus it sat on my bookshelf. I don't have the paperback any longer, so I read the Ebook on my Kindle smartphone app. This is an almost perfect book for an Ereader- it's decently long but not too long, and the prose is breezy enough to make switching between the book and other apps easy.
As for the book itself, not as funny as I remember it, but in 2018, large swathes of the humor industrial complex have adapted to the combination of humor and whimsy that marked this book as distinctive when it was released. There is even, most improbably, a television version.
Like Water For Chocolate (1989)
by Laura Esquivel
Like Water For Chocolate is another fine example of the "international best seller": Not written in English, but appealing to a broad, English speaking audience, Like Water For Chocolate, was, for my money a pretty pedestrian paint-by-numbers example of magical realism set on the border of Mexico and San Antonio. Tita, the main character, is told by her hateful mother, Maria Elena, that her destiny is never to marry, to take care of her, Maria Elena until her death. If you've read any books in the area of magical realism, you have a good idea of what happens next.
The book here is that each chapter has a recipe, and much of the action of the book involves cooking the recipe listed at the beginning of each chapter, interspersed with love, hate, rebels, rape, love making and lots and lots of passionate arguing. Seems to me that the ideal audience would be someone who was totally unfamiliar with the classics of magical realism, because for that reader, Like Water For Chocolate would be pretty fresh and original.
Published 8/28/18
Foucault's Pendulum (1988)
by Umberto Eco
Foucault's Pendulum has to be one of the most unlikely international best-selling books of the 20th century. Written by an Italian semiotician and theorist, albeit one who had already struck international best-seller gold with his earlier book, The Name of the Rose (1980), Foucault's Pendulum was quickly translated into English and rose on the best seller list. In 2003, author Dan Brown wrote a similar-but-different book, The Da Vinci Code, which drew heavily on many of the themes and historical events. Today, Foucault's Pendulum is often called "The Da Vinci Code for people who aren't idiots," but really it's only the common theme of a secret conspiracy perpetrated by the Knights Templar that bind the two books together.
Above all other things, Foucault's Pendulum is what I call a brick, i.e. a work of literature that runs 500 pages plus (650 pages in this case). Bricks present special problems to the reader, but mostly it's just the fact that a brick can only be read seriously due to the size and weight of the book itself. The hardback edition I checked out of the Los Angeles Public Library was huge, big and rectangular, and weighed several pounds. It wasn't a book I would want to own, and I was vaguely embarrassed the one time I read it in public. The brick is a genre of literary fiction that had a peak roughly in coincidence with the rise of mall-chain book stores, Crown Books, and later Barnes and Noble and Borders. Foucault's Pendulum is what I call "peak brick"- among the 650 pages you find literally page long lists of occult organizations read out of a mailing list. Don't tell me that this portion was somehow central to the narrative or the book itself- it is filler.
Maybe not to Umberto Eco, who has his reasons, or utter lack of reason, for his decision, but for the publisher that bought the book this way, published it this way and made a mint on the back of those decisions. It's easy to imagine a universe where Foucault's Pendulum is either 350 pages long or doesn't exist in English translation at all, but here we are.
Published 8/29/18
The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul (1988)
by Douglas Adams
Douglas Adams placing three books in the first edition of the 1001 Books list is risible. Going back and looking at some of the one book authors- it boggles the mind that the editors could have let three of Adams books make it while basically all of literature from East Asia is excluded. For sure, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy makes a good case for itself, simply because of the influence it displayed on the growth of the internet, the combination of science fiction and humor and a continued audience for the book itself. Perhaps, the case can be made for a second title, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, but a stronger case is that if the list is going to make only a cursory attempt to include detective fiction, the inclusion of a contemporary work parodying detective fiction is unnecessary.
The inclusion of The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul, the sequel to Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency is almost wholly inexplicable except by way of the overrepresentation of recent authors and English authors. The events of Long Dark Tea-Time are classic Douglas Adams: rogue Norse Gods, a detective who operates by karmic chance and a female lead who is poorly characterized. Honestly, it's hard to make any kind of honest case for including it in the first place. So few sequels make the list as separate entries!
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| Who can forget the casting in the movie version of The Bonfire of the Vanities: Tom Hanks, Melanie Griffith and Bruce Willis as English(?!?) journalist James Fallows |
The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987)
by Tom Wolfe
Many of the remaining unreviewed titles from the original 1001 Books list share the following attributes:
-I've read them before
- Over 500 pages in length
- Written in the mid to late 20th century
The Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe's 690 page (28 hour as an Audiobook) Magnum Opus, ticks all three boxes. In fact, I've been dreading having to reread this tome- especially since the entire enterprise hasn't aged well. The aging process was irrevocably sabotaged by the disastrous Brian DePalma directed, Tom Hanks starring movie version, which is high on the matrix of films that lost money AND were critically reviled AND featured across the board A list talent.
As far as Wolfe's canonical reputation is concerned, he's got one mortal lock: The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test. You can make an argument for The Right Stuff and The Bonfire of the Vanities. His later work- everything after The Bonfire of the Vanities, was basically a flop. Perhaps there is some hope for a posthumous reevaluation of his post Bonfire novels- there were three of them spread over a decade and a half- but I doubt I'll be reading any of them.
I waited months to check out my copy of the Audiobook from the library- then I had to rush through the 25 plus hours in 21 days- making for some uncomfortable days of listening. The entire time I was waiting for the actual trial of Sherman McCoy for the hit and run incident that defines the book, having forgotten that Wolfe actually had the gall to write a seven hundred page book almost entirely about the criminal courts of New York City without writing a trial into his book.
Surely, we could have done without the hundred pages of describing dinner parties and tony restaurants favored by the British expatriate journalist community- but no- it's satire, don't forget, and The Bonfire of the Vanities, is at a very basic level, supposed to be funny. If that's the case, I didn't laugh a single time the entire time I was listening. In fact, I found The Bonfire of the Vanities deeply unfunny, and while I'm not the kind of reader to get offended by satire, some of his portraits- particularly his Al Sharpton derived Reverend, occasionally evoke a cringe.
Published 3/8/19
The Shadow Lines (1988)
by Amitav Ghosh
Replaces: American Pastoral by Philip Roth
The term "Indian Literature" is about as broad as "European Literature" in terms of the number of literary languages represented. Ultimately though, Indian Literature is rendered extremely accessible by the presence of English as a lingua franca for the Indian nation-state, and the almost universal acceptance of English by the ruling elite and educated, i.e. those most likely to write (and read) literary fiction. It also makes sense that English speaking audiences for literary fiction would be more interested by books and characters who exist between the west and India- more relate-able. So it is not surprising that The Shadow Lines is yet another work of South Asian literary fiction featuring action that switches between partition era India and the environs of London.
Like most of the South Asian writers on the 1001 Books list, I hadn't heard of Ghosh before picking up the list mandated selection, but once again, I'm glad I did. Judging from the lack of e books and audiobooks, Ghosh hasn't made much of an impression in the United States- compared to is status in the UK- but that isn't surprising. If a South Asian writer wants to make a dent in the USA, he or she either better be a major literary award winner or a writer who grew up in the United States itself. Ghosh replaces American Pastoral- Roth's first Pulitzer Prize winner but otherwise a mundane example of the nine volume Nathan Zuckerman series.
Published 5/11/19
Nervous Conditions (1988)
by Tsitsi Danarembga
Nervous Conditions by Zimbabwean writer Tsitsi Danarembga is one of the last books on the original 1001 Books list that I had left. No Audiobook, No Ebook version, only a single copy in the Los Angeles Public Library. Her Wikipedia page says that Nervous Conditions is the first book written in English by a black Zimbabwean author.
The narrator is Tambu, a young woman growing up during the closing days of colonialism. When her older brother dies while away at missionary school, she is chosen to replace him. There she befriends Nyasha, the daughter of her wealthy uncle (who has sponsored her education.) Nyasha has recently returned from school in England, and it is the conflict that this return creates which provides the title of the book, Nervous Conditions.
Nyasha is plagued by emotional conflicts with her patriarchial father and eventually develops an eating disorder, while Tambu balances her new education and village bound family with more aplomb. I read Nervous Conditions after finishing The Old Drift- set in Rhodesia but written by an expatriate, and it is clear that the difference between native and expatriate fiction in Africa often boils down to the fact that the former have a grasp of African village life, and the transitions from that world to the modern urban world, and expatriate writers do not.
Inland (1988)
by Gerald Murnane
Replaces: Cocaine Nights by J.G. Ballard
Like many of the authors that missed out on the original edition of the 1001 Books list but made it onto the second, Murnane is an author writing outside of a major literary marketplace who is well known as a difficult, complicated and experimental novelist. Woe be unto those writers of difficult literary fiction who live and work outside of a major hub like London, New York or Paris. Even for Murnane, who writes in English, the appeal for a would-be publisher outside of his native Australia is limited. Who is going to buy a Gerald Murnane novel when every description is liable to begin with some variation of the description on the Wikipedia page of this book, "some criticize its repetition, lack of clear structure and reliance on writing as a subject matter."
Perhaps he is an amazing writer, but I was unable to extract that from Inland, which mostly reminded me of a more laconic W.G. Sebald. If you've read Sebald and not Murnane, trust me, it is a good reference point. If you haven't read Sebald, the London Telegraph defines "Sebaldian" as, "the mournful travel notes of narrators stumbling across Suffolk sands or through European cities, remembered meetings, fragments from books and plays, photographs and paintings; a cut and paste of cultural and personal memory."
The only words in that phrase you have to change to make it apply to Murnane is to exchange "Suffolk sands" for "Australian outback" and voila. I'm sad to see Cocaine Nights by J.G. Ballard get the boot. I understand the decision: Ballard is no doubt over represented in the original edition of the 1001 Books list; but I genuinely enjoy reading Ballard, and I like Cocaine Nights, as I also like Super-Cannes- both books about dystopian resort living in Southern Europe.
Published 5/31/19
The Great Indian Novel (1989)
by Shashi Tharoor
Replaces: The Untouchable by John Banville
I have procrastinated in the writing of this entry, about The Great Indian Novel by Shashi Tharoor- well known within India, where he is a Member of Parliament for the Congress Party. The title of The Great Indian Novel is both a play on the Indian literary tradition- based on The Great Indian Novel being a rough translation of the Mahabharata, a foundational poem-myth, thousands of stanzas in length, which occupies a position in the culture of South Asia to that occupied by the Odyssey in the West; it is also- more obviously for Western readers- a play on the phrase, "The Great American Novel;" typically used in the breach these days, to denote the tradition of the American bildungsroman.
Within India, Tharoor is both a democratically elected politician and a respected public intellectual, with decades of weekly columns in all of the leading English language Indian papers. Before getting involved in domestic politics, he worked at the United Nations for a decade. In other words, he occupies a very different space in the world then an author like Salman Rushdie, who is the only comparison that comes to mind for the blend of myth and sharp eyed rewriting of the foundation myth of India from the top down that defines The Great Indian Novel.
The Great Indian Novel is a welcome addition to the shelf of post-colonial Indian literature, a distinctively Indian voice, writing from India, not a writer who achieved international literary fame with limited domestic recognition. I would have loved an Audiobook edition- I don't believe one exists.
Within India, Tharoor is both a democratically elected politician and a respected public intellectual, with decades of weekly columns in all of the leading English language Indian papers. Before getting involved in domestic politics, he worked at the United Nations for a decade. In other words, he occupies a very different space in the world then an author like Salman Rushdie, who is the only comparison that comes to mind for the blend of myth and sharp eyed rewriting of the foundation myth of India from the top down that defines The Great Indian Novel.
The Great Indian Novel is a welcome addition to the shelf of post-colonial Indian literature, a distinctively Indian voice, writing from India, not a writer who achieved international literary fame with limited domestic recognition. I would have loved an Audiobook edition- I don't believe one exists.
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| Bulgarian author Victor Paskov |
Published 6/10/19
A Ballad for Georg Henig (1987)
by Victor Paskov
Replaces: Operation Shylock by Philip Roth
The 1001 Books project is really bogging down in it's last stages, as I run out of titles of all sorts from the original list, and Audiobook titles from the 2008 revised list. A Ballad for Georg Henig gives Bulgarian literature its first representative. Paskov is totally unknown in the United States- he has zero books available for sale at Amazon, which is about as low as you can go. The Los Angeles Public Library has a copy of the UK edition- it even has an "imported by" sticker on it.
The Bulgarian-ness is about as unclear as you would expect from a single example. Paskov resembles central.eastern European authors preoccupied with the vicissitudes of life in Communist Europe at the end of Communism. Georg Henig is a violin maker par excellance, now in his dotage and suffering in a sub-par basement apartment to which he has dubious title. Henig experiences changes when a local musician and his son rediscover Henig and enlist him in the father's quest to build his nagging wife "the greatest sideboard ever made" despite having no experience as a carpenter. Melancholy and depression permeate A Ballad for Georg Henig in much the way the same emotions permeate all "serious" European literature written between the end of World War II and the present day.
Published 6/27/19
The Beautiful Mrs. Seidenman (1989)
by Andrzej Szczypiorski
Replaces: The Robber Bride by Margaret Atwood
A clear theme from the 1001 Books revision in 2008 was adding in new and different viewpoints, and as you move back in time, the interest in diversifying the viewpoints embodied by the books on the list becomes clearer. Szczypioski is a Polish author, not Jewish, and was a staunch critic of the Communist regime and member of the Solidarity movement. The Beautiful Mrs. Seidenman is sort-of about the title character, the Polish looking Jewish wife of a recently deceased Doctor, trying to avoid internment in the Warsaw ghetto by posing as the Polish widow of an Army officer (not Jewish.)
But really the approach is kaleidoscopic and we get the perspectives of several different characters- the resistance fighters who spring into action when she is denounced by a local Jewish informer. The perspective of said informer. The sympathetic ethnic German who has lived in Poland his whole live but finds himself as an officer in the German army, but secretly helps the Polish resistance, the German officer who is in charge of ferreting out secret Jews among the Polish population. The activity of the book takes place over a single day: Mrs. Seidenman is denounced, arrested and released, and the various characters reminiscence about life before, during and after the invasion.
Mrs. Seidenman replaces another Margaret Atwood novel, The Robber Bride. How crazy is it that Alice Munro won the Nobel Prize in 2013- a Canadian writer unrepresented in the 1001 Books list, while Atwood is among the most listed authors. It must drive Atwood NUTS.
Published 8/22/19
Half of Man is Woman (1988)
by Zhang Xianliang
Replaces: The Heather Blazing by Colm Toibin
You would think the editors of the 1001 Books project would have put this groundbreaking Chinese novel in the original edition, but it didn't make it in till the first revision, replacing the forgettable The Heather Blazing by Colm Toibin- a book I literally can not remember. I would suspect it's about Irish people. I believe what is unusual about Half of Man is Woman is part the frank sexual content- which I guess was quite unusual in China at the time- and the fact that it is a book about life in a Chinese prison camp that was approved by the Chinese government. China's reckoning with the "excesses" of the Cultural Revolution has been a mixed bag: Some regrets, some denial, but hey it wasn't entirely bad, which is also the tone of Half of Man is Woman.
Looking back, it can be hard to even remember the pre-Tiananmen Square vibe in China (Tiananmen Square happened in 1989), but at the time many Western observers thought that China was on the path to something more than a single party dictatorship. Half of Man is Woman reflects that thawing, in the same way that Perestroika opened up the path for the official acknowledgement of Stalin era prison camps in literature.
Like the narrator, author Zhang Xianliang had the (mis)fortune to be sent off to a Chinese prison camp BEFORE the cultural revolution- in 1957, as a "rightist" during a period where many upper class, middle class and intellectual families were being wholesale removed from society. The upside is that he was already in prison when the Cultural Revolution reached it's insane peak, and the narrator of Half of Man is Woman is actually thankful that he has a safe place to exist during the frenzy.
His life at a Chinese labor camp borders on the ideal, the major issue being a lack of sexual potency. Most of Half of Man is Woman concerns the relationship he has with a woman who has been incarcerated for immorality, and after his virility is restored in the aftermath of some flood-avoiding heroics, he finds that sexual potency opens up new problems.
Published 10/28/19
Couples, Passerby (1988)
by Botho Strauss
Replaces: The Temple of My Familiar by Alice Walker
Botho Strauss ranks as a major omission from the original edition of the 1001 Books list. The status of cross-over playwrights and novelists is a point of friction within the canon as constructed by the editors of the 1001 Books project. There are no plays- presumably because plays are not books. Their status mirrors that of creative non-fiction, which is almost entirely excluded from all editions. The unspoken assumption behind the 1001 Books list is that Book = Novel, with multiple exceptions for novellas, some for short story collections, and essentially none for individual short stories, plays and poetry.
The biggest exemption from the unspoken Book = Novel for the purposes of 1001 Books is experimental literature, works of which are frequently included in the 1001 Books list. Strauss is essentially unknown in the English speaking world- his wikipedia page is almost non existent, and I'd personally never heard of him before I read The Young Man- his other contribution to the 2008 1001 Books list. Like The Young Man, Couples, Passerby is most explicitly not a novel, being more a collection of observations and aphorisms surrounding interpersonal relationships. Unlike The Young Man, Couples, Passerby is comprehensible. The Young Man is so dense and surreal that making heads or tales of it requires careful note taking and line by line consideration. Truth be told I didn't derive much from either book, and it's hard to make a case for Strauss' late inclusion, except as he provides another multi-volume German language author.
Published 1/13/20
Bandits (1987)
by Elmore Leonard
Elmore Leonard is an Audiobook sweet spot- he has tons of titles, and they are almost all freely available on the Los Angeles Public Library app. Of course, Leonard was incredibly prolific. If you leave out his 1950's vintage Westerns, the crime/caper/detective novel period of his career lasted four solid decades with parts of two more decades at the beginning and end. He averaged about a book a year. Readers looking to make a case for Leonard as THE crime writer of the second half of the 20th century might focus on the diversity in his bibliography- it's not like he was writing about one private detective over and over again. This gives his books a freshness they might otherwise lack, and leads me to wonder where each book will take me.
He's also a great Audiobook author, none of his books are long, they typically have a single protagonist and move a straight line from beginning to end. Bandits is his New Orleans book- about an ex con working at a funeral home who has a chance encounter with an ex nun trying to help a woman escaping a despotic commander of the Contras in Nicaragua. Bandits isn't one of Leonard's most famous books- the movie rights were optioned by Bruce Willis but the movie was never made, and three years later he published Get Shorty, which many casual readers would identify as THE Elmore Leonard novel. But Bandits has a lot going for it, mostly the New Orleans locale, but also the backdrop of the U.S. involvement in Nicaragua.
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| Here is a shot of Malin Ackerman's boob from the movie version of Watchmen |
Published 5/18/20
Watchmen (1987)
by Alan Moore
Watchmen- the original comic version, in the collected softback edition, is one of a handful of comics that influenced me on a "literary" level. Watchmen, Arkham Asylum (1989) written by Grant Morrison, V for Vendetta (also written by Alan Moore) and The Dark Knight Returns (1986)by Frank Miller. That is also where it ends for me- I never got into "adult" comics outside of movie versions. Never watched or read Anime. It was something that got caught out of my life because the girls I dated didn't think comics were cool, and they cost plenty of money, so at the time, I just didn't want to pursue it. I did hang on to those favorites- I still have the hardback edition of Arkham Asylum and paperback versions of the other in my law office.
The significance of Watchmen for me is that it is evidence that there is no real distinction between so-called "high" art and "low" or "popular" art. The best argument for that is actually none of the comics but another comic I read, Maus(1991) by Art Spiegelman, about the Holocaust, which is the first comic I can recall being treated as a "real" book- so much so that I received a copy for the holidays from my parents, who were always on my case about science fiction, fantasy, Dungeons and Dragons and comics as being a waste of time.
Watchmen (1987)
by Alan Moore
Watchmen- the original comic version, in the collected softback edition, is one of a handful of comics that influenced me on a "literary" level. Watchmen, Arkham Asylum (1989) written by Grant Morrison, V for Vendetta (also written by Alan Moore) and The Dark Knight Returns (1986)by Frank Miller. That is also where it ends for me- I never got into "adult" comics outside of movie versions. Never watched or read Anime. It was something that got caught out of my life because the girls I dated didn't think comics were cool, and they cost plenty of money, so at the time, I just didn't want to pursue it. I did hang on to those favorites- I still have the hardback edition of Arkham Asylum and paperback versions of the other in my law office.
The significance of Watchmen for me is that it is evidence that there is no real distinction between so-called "high" art and "low" or "popular" art. The best argument for that is actually none of the comics but another comic I read, Maus(1991) by Art Spiegelman, about the Holocaust, which is the first comic I can recall being treated as a "real" book- so much so that I received a copy for the holidays from my parents, who were always on my case about science fiction, fantasy, Dungeons and Dragons and comics as being a waste of time.
Since I read the comic, I've remained a fan of the Watchmen universe- I was terribly disappointed by the movie version and loved the HBO t.v. show- which is not a version of the original comic, but captures the spirit of the comic more than the movie. I didn't reread the comic for this post- I'm frankly not sure where it is, and the television show just finished up a few months ago. It's interesting that Watchmen was included but Maus was not, maybe because the English literary establishment is anti-semetic.
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| This is the boxed edition of the full 1700 page translation, published in 2018 by the New York Review of Books. I read the 1987 translation, an edited version, only 400 pages. |
Published 7/21/20
Anniversaries:
From the Life of Gesine Cresspahl
(Leila Vennewitz edited version)(1987)
by Uwe Johnson
This book proved to be one of the toughest "gets" in the original edition of 1001 Books. First of all, it's listed in 1001 Books under the German title, Jahrestage. Second, the New York Review of Books Classics published a new, full translation in 2018, two volumes, 1790 pages. I checked out the Ebook from the Los Angeles Public Library and.... I mean good luck reading a 1000+ page book on Kindle or other Ereader. Five hundred pages is about as long as I can go on an Ebook. The version of Anniversaries I checked out from the library was the Leila Vennewitz "cut" edition, 400 pages. The original German version was published in four volumes between 1970 and 1983 and then Johnson died in 1984.
Anniversaries takes the form of 366 "diary" entries, written daily between August 1967 and 1968, the diary entries are very loose, but they center on the life of Gesine Creespahl, the daughter of an English father and German mother who lived in Germany prior to World War II. Gesine lives in New York City with her daughter. She reads the New York Times- every day has a summary of daily events, mostly dealing with Vietnam. The rest of the narrative ranges backwards and forwards in time, shifting between third and first person from a variety of perspectives.
The 400 page version mostly concerns the story of Cresspahl's parents, an English carpenter and his German wife who take up a small piece of land in Jericho, a fictional town in the German Baltic. This story is mostly told in third person, when it comes to Gesine's contemporary life as a not impoverished single mother, living on Riverside Drive in Manhattan, reading the New York Times everyday as she commutes to her job as a translator/interpreter for a multinational bank. The most obvious comparison is to the Danzig trilogy by 1999 Nobel Prize in Literature winner Grunter Grass, who also wrote about the same area.
The story Johnson tells about life in Jericho is complicated, Jericho has five Jews, one a distinguished veterinarian who was decorated in the First World War, the second a family of merchants. The rise of the Nazi's happens at the expense of the already existing German Workers Party, and their gradual ascension to power, together with their particular form of antisemitism is viewed as an imposition, with a "nouveau riche" class of Nazi beneficiaries not necessarily in tune with the pre-existing elite. Gesine's father, an English immigrant with strong family ties, is resolutely anti-Nazi, the reaction of her mother is more complicated.
I can't imagine reading the full 1700 page edition. Actually, I could probably do it if I got the boxed New York Review of Books edition. 1500 pages, four or five volumes, that is where I start running into trouble. Even the 400 page version was tough sledding, particularly the contemporary portions written in the "present." I didn't find Gesine particularly appealing/sympathetic, which became wearisome as the reader is forced to spend large portions of Anniversaries "inside" her head.
Published 3/16/22
Anthill of the Savannah (1987)
by Chinua Achebe
It's funny because Things Fall Apart, Achebe's classic- is so widely read- I think it was assigned to me my freshman year in high school, then in college the teacher who taught creative writing was a scholar of African literature who helped "break" Achebe in the West (back when Professors of African Literature were white dudes.) Anthill was published two decades after his previous one- A Man of the People in 1966 and helped to revive interest in his earlier work. That said, I'd never actually seen copies of ANY of Achebe's books in a book store until I saw a remaindered copy of a repress of this book in the Harvard Book Store a couple years back. I bought it as part of my program to privilege diversity in my reading- and canon level writers who are not white guys are universally benefiting from that decision.
Anthill of the Savannah is a bleak take on the gradual moral corruption that accompanied many mid 20th century military style African dictatorships. Sam, the Dictator, employs Chris, a former newspaper editor, as his minister of information. The events unfurl in a way that should surprise no one familiar with the currents of 20th century African history but I can't think of another book where the perspective is so "inside baseball," usually books with this kind of theme take place at ground level, or at least removed from the corridor of power, as the various elite machinations impact innocent bystanders. In Anthill of the Savannah, no one is innocent .
Tharoor replaces The Untouchable- John Banville's take on the World War II era Cambridge ring spying scandal. It's good- not as dense as some of Banville's work- but it isn't his Booker Prize winner.
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