Collected: 1990's Literature 1993-1996
If the period from 1990-1992 features some of my least inspired writing, 1993-1996 represents some of the best. You can see a clear break-out for Japanese literature in translation in this time period, there's also a clear shift away from Anglo-American authors in the books chosen for the 2008 revision of the 1001 Books project- including three Dutch authors (up from zero). Many of the best writers from this era were in top form during this particular period- bangers from Rushdie, Amis and Roth. This was a particularly active cohort for the revision of the 1001 Books project between 2006 and 2008, reflecting perhaps that they were getting into the "present" and making accurate picks was more difficult due to the recency of the publication dates.
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Published 9/11/17
The Stone Diaries (1993)
by Carol Shields
The Stone Diaries is a very subtlety existentialist fictional "auto biography" of a very "average" woman: born in the Canadian Mid-West, raised in the American Mid-West, returns to Ottowa to live as a stay-at-home Mom and raise three kids. Survives her older husband, writes a gardening column for the local paper, retires to Florida, dies after a short illness.
Daisy Goodwell Flett is touched by tragedy: A Mother who dies in child birth, a first Husband who dies on their Parisian honeymoon by falling out a window. She is not the stereotypical woman of literary fiction- she does not live in a city, does not struggle (except briefly) with neuroses, does not make a radical break from convention. In fact, despite this being an "auto biography" about her life, we hardly learn anything about Daisy at all, except, perhaps, that she experiences a kind of life long alienation from her surroundings. She is from the generation of women that did not directly experience "women's liberation" while benefiting from the pre-conditions which led to the feminist uprising of the late 1960's and 1970's.
In the end, the reader is left questioning whether any of it matters at all. It's the same kind of feeling you get from reading 20th century European philosophical novels. Shields adopts distancing techniques which extend beyond the feelings of Ms. Flett. Chapters skip entire decades, and some chapters are simply letters or newspaper articles, making The Stone Diaries a series of snapshots, from birth to death.
Published 9/11/17
The Stone Diaries (1993)
by Carol Shields
The Stone Diaries is a very subtlety existentialist fictional "auto biography" of a very "average" woman: born in the Canadian Mid-West, raised in the American Mid-West, returns to Ottowa to live as a stay-at-home Mom and raise three kids. Survives her older husband, writes a gardening column for the local paper, retires to Florida, dies after a short illness.
Daisy Goodwell Flett is touched by tragedy: A Mother who dies in child birth, a first Husband who dies on their Parisian honeymoon by falling out a window. She is not the stereotypical woman of literary fiction- she does not live in a city, does not struggle (except briefly) with neuroses, does not make a radical break from convention. In fact, despite this being an "auto biography" about her life, we hardly learn anything about Daisy at all, except, perhaps, that she experiences a kind of life long alienation from her surroundings. She is from the generation of women that did not directly experience "women's liberation" while benefiting from the pre-conditions which led to the feminist uprising of the late 1960's and 1970's.
In the end, the reader is left questioning whether any of it matters at all. It's the same kind of feeling you get from reading 20th century European philosophical novels. Shields adopts distancing techniques which extend beyond the feelings of Ms. Flett. Chapters skip entire decades, and some chapters are simply letters or newspaper articles, making The Stone Diaries a series of snapshots, from birth to death.
Published 9/17/17
The Robber Bride (1993)
by Margaret Atwood
Oh man, rich white English-speaking people and their fucking problems. I could write a book. OH WAIT EVERYONE ALREADY HAS. Add The Robber Bride to that shelf. It shows Atwood doing her best Doris Lessing/Nadine Gordimer take, dressing up standard white-lady personal issues with a noirish/mystery angle. As you would expect from a Canadian author, nothing is genuinely shocking in these pages, even though she tries- comically- in my mind- to inject a frisson of drugs and Bohemian low life to the proceedings. The story of three female college friends: A wealthy business lady, a college history professor and a ditzy hippie- and their encounters with the outrageous Zenia- a woman of no known origins, who lies and fucks her way through their lives, before dying- in Lebanon- in the first chapter of the book.
Atwood takes up backwards in time for each of the three main characters- giving each a different backstory with various levels of trauma- the mother of the history professor just walks out one day, the mother of the hippie goes insane and dies, and she is molested by her adoptive father (her uncle). Each also gets to tell the story of their traumatic encounter with Zenia- all involving stolen money and sexual betrayal.
Like the characters in a Doris Lessing novel, you get the firm impression that Atwood does not like her own characters very much. Each of them is played like a fiddle by Zenia in their turn and when it turns out that Zenia is not, in fact, dead, they allow her to manipulate them all AGAIN. Being generally familiar with the Canadian national character, such a plot isn't wholly surprising, but if she tried that shit in a major United States city she would be dead or in jail.
Published 9/21/17
Operation Shylock (1993)
by Philip Roth
The case for Roth as an all-time great, vs. a "great in his time" is based on his late career productivity, which was singled out by the Booker Prize when they gave him an International Prize in 2011. Ultimately, though, Roth is perhaps the premier non winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in the 20th and, indeed, 21st century, a status which spawns it's own cottage industry almost every year when the new winner is announced. Bob Dylan winning last year was a particular high point for the "Philip Roth didn't win again" school. This discussion inevitably tracks with a corresponding complaint that the Nobel Committee is somehow "biased" against English language writers.
The idea is that Philip Roth is the best American writer of his generation to NOT win the award, and since the Nobel Prize for Literature is only awarded to living (and active) authors, Philip Roth, in his 80's and retired, is missing, or has already missed his chance. Personally, I'm more interested in the prospects of the still writing Thomas Pynchon when it comes to American authors and the Nobel Prize for Literature, but I am beginning to really appreciate Roth, despite him being underrepresented in the 1001 Books project.
Operation Shylock is another strong mid-late career Philip Roth title. It is a meta-fictional lark about a character Philip Roth, the author, confronting his doppelganger over his dissemination of a "reverse Zionism" involving the re-distribution of Israeli Ashkenazi Jews back to Europe. While in Israel, he is drawn into the Operation Shylock of the title, a trip to Greece to meet with a shadowy cabal who may or may not be Jews who are secretly funding the PLO.
Shylock has action, comedy and lengthy soliloquy's by almost all of the characters. Roth, the author/narrator and Roth the impostor are both obsessed with the then current John Demjanjuk Nazi war criminal trial. Roth raises many interesting questions about Judaism, anti-antisemitism and the Israeli-Palestinian problem, while also writing an interesting plot and creating compelling, if familiar, characters. In short, as one of his characters might say, "What is there to complain about?" Only that Philip Roth, an older, white Jewish, Prize winning author has nothing interesting left to observe about the human condition, but this is plainly not the case.
Published 9/28/17
Complicity (1993)
by Iain Banks
Four titles from Scottish author Iain Banks in the 2006 edition of the 1001 Books list! That is a lot of representation from a non-canon author of what is essentially high-brow/regional genre fiction. He is squarely in the heartland of the renaissance of Scottish literature from the late 20th century. Complicity is basically a serial-killer story, about a guy who goes around killing Thatcher-era Captains of Industry and other emblems of Thatcher era authority in prosaic fashion- again, the relationship of the killee to their perceived moral failing is made part of the method of dispatch (cut off the arms of an arms dealer, sodomize a rapist sympathizing high court judge. Complicity immediately brings to mind What a Carve Up!, by English author Jonathan Coe, which employs the same bag of tricks in a "country house" novel setting
Clearly, the English intelligentsia had murder on the mind in the early 1990's, although you could also read the introduction of such graphically violent stuff into the 1001 Books list from England and Scotland as a reaction to the influence of American and Hollywood- and the penchant for both to make canon works which include graphic sex and violence. In Complicity, Cameron Colley is a serious journalist- covering politics and current events for a Scottish broadsheet. He enjoys playing computer games, smoking and drinking, crystal meth and fucking an old college classmate (who is married to another college classmate). He's on the trail of a hot story involving the illicit sale of arms during the Iran-Iraq war (specifically, the mysterious deaths of several of those involved from "natural causes") when new bodies start piling up.
Banks also narrates chapters from the perspective of the unknown serial killer. I suppose those chapters are shocking, but not really, for an era where Silence of the Lambs qualifies as a golden oldie. Maybe in 1993, in Great Britain, sodomizing a rapist-positive High Court Judge was something at the edge of imagination but not today.
Operation Shylock (1993)
by Philip Roth
The case for Roth as an all-time great, vs. a "great in his time" is based on his late career productivity, which was singled out by the Booker Prize when they gave him an International Prize in 2011. Ultimately, though, Roth is perhaps the premier non winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in the 20th and, indeed, 21st century, a status which spawns it's own cottage industry almost every year when the new winner is announced. Bob Dylan winning last year was a particular high point for the "Philip Roth didn't win again" school. This discussion inevitably tracks with a corresponding complaint that the Nobel Committee is somehow "biased" against English language writers.
The idea is that Philip Roth is the best American writer of his generation to NOT win the award, and since the Nobel Prize for Literature is only awarded to living (and active) authors, Philip Roth, in his 80's and retired, is missing, or has already missed his chance. Personally, I'm more interested in the prospects of the still writing Thomas Pynchon when it comes to American authors and the Nobel Prize for Literature, but I am beginning to really appreciate Roth, despite him being underrepresented in the 1001 Books project.
Operation Shylock is another strong mid-late career Philip Roth title. It is a meta-fictional lark about a character Philip Roth, the author, confronting his doppelganger over his dissemination of a "reverse Zionism" involving the re-distribution of Israeli Ashkenazi Jews back to Europe. While in Israel, he is drawn into the Operation Shylock of the title, a trip to Greece to meet with a shadowy cabal who may or may not be Jews who are secretly funding the PLO.
Shylock has action, comedy and lengthy soliloquy's by almost all of the characters. Roth, the author/narrator and Roth the impostor are both obsessed with the then current John Demjanjuk Nazi war criminal trial. Roth raises many interesting questions about Judaism, anti-antisemitism and the Israeli-Palestinian problem, while also writing an interesting plot and creating compelling, if familiar, characters. In short, as one of his characters might say, "What is there to complain about?" Only that Philip Roth, an older, white Jewish, Prize winning author has nothing interesting left to observe about the human condition, but this is plainly not the case.
Published 9/28/17
Complicity (1993)
by Iain Banks
Four titles from Scottish author Iain Banks in the 2006 edition of the 1001 Books list! That is a lot of representation from a non-canon author of what is essentially high-brow/regional genre fiction. He is squarely in the heartland of the renaissance of Scottish literature from the late 20th century. Complicity is basically a serial-killer story, about a guy who goes around killing Thatcher-era Captains of Industry and other emblems of Thatcher era authority in prosaic fashion- again, the relationship of the killee to their perceived moral failing is made part of the method of dispatch (cut off the arms of an arms dealer, sodomize a rapist sympathizing high court judge. Complicity immediately brings to mind What a Carve Up!, by English author Jonathan Coe, which employs the same bag of tricks in a "country house" novel setting
Clearly, the English intelligentsia had murder on the mind in the early 1990's, although you could also read the introduction of such graphically violent stuff into the 1001 Books list from England and Scotland as a reaction to the influence of American and Hollywood- and the penchant for both to make canon works which include graphic sex and violence. In Complicity, Cameron Colley is a serious journalist- covering politics and current events for a Scottish broadsheet. He enjoys playing computer games, smoking and drinking, crystal meth and fucking an old college classmate (who is married to another college classmate). He's on the trail of a hot story involving the illicit sale of arms during the Iran-Iraq war (specifically, the mysterious deaths of several of those involved from "natural causes") when new bodies start piling up.
Banks also narrates chapters from the perspective of the unknown serial killer. I suppose those chapters are shocking, but not really, for an era where Silence of the Lambs qualifies as a golden oldie. Maybe in 1993, in Great Britain, sodomizing a rapist-positive High Court Judge was something at the edge of imagination but not today.
Published 9/29//17
On Love (1993)
by Alain de Botton
Alain de Botton is a oddity- a French style "public intellectual" of a type almost unknown in America for the past half century- a writer with opinions, based on philosophy, about how one might live in the modern world. To a cynical eye, you might say he is a high falutin lifestyle guru- and the fact that his "Ted Talk" is on the first page of his Google search return is telling. For those reasons, I like but don't love Botton. Even though I don't know anyone outside of my current partner who has one of his books on the shelve, I would be vaguely embarrassed to admit that I was a fan.
That said, I find myself quietly nodding my head every two to three pages of any Botton written work I dig into. His brand of philosophy leans heavy on classical Stoicism and his methods and style hearken back to the tradition of Plato and Aristotle. Adapted for the 20th and 21st century literary marketplace, of course. This background is clear even in On Love- his first, and basically (barring a sequel) only novel- and his biggest hit- a book that sold hundreds of thousands of copies across the world and gave him the audience for his true calling of life as a public intellectual/pop philosopher.
On Love shows some of that philosophical heritage- writing a novel in numbered paragraphs strikes me as something only a classically trained philosopher would do (though that particular tradition dates to 19th century analytic philosophy.) I'm sure On Love made the 1001 Books list simply because it is his only novel, not his best work. For my money, that would be the Consolations of Philosophy, which I've kept on the shelf for two decades. The idea of prostituting philosophy for the marketplace is controversial. Really the only people in this country who care about philosophy are academics, so Botton took this leap of popularizing philosophy, but I think he deserved to be acclaimed, not criticized. Better Botton than nothing at all, that's what I say.
On Love (1993)
by Alain de Botton
Alain de Botton is a oddity- a French style "public intellectual" of a type almost unknown in America for the past half century- a writer with opinions, based on philosophy, about how one might live in the modern world. To a cynical eye, you might say he is a high falutin lifestyle guru- and the fact that his "Ted Talk" is on the first page of his Google search return is telling. For those reasons, I like but don't love Botton. Even though I don't know anyone outside of my current partner who has one of his books on the shelve, I would be vaguely embarrassed to admit that I was a fan.
That said, I find myself quietly nodding my head every two to three pages of any Botton written work I dig into. His brand of philosophy leans heavy on classical Stoicism and his methods and style hearken back to the tradition of Plato and Aristotle. Adapted for the 20th and 21st century literary marketplace, of course. This background is clear even in On Love- his first, and basically (barring a sequel) only novel- and his biggest hit- a book that sold hundreds of thousands of copies across the world and gave him the audience for his true calling of life as a public intellectual/pop philosopher.
On Love shows some of that philosophical heritage- writing a novel in numbered paragraphs strikes me as something only a classically trained philosopher would do (though that particular tradition dates to 19th century analytic philosophy.) I'm sure On Love made the 1001 Books list simply because it is his only novel, not his best work. For my money, that would be the Consolations of Philosophy, which I've kept on the shelf for two decades. The idea of prostituting philosophy for the marketplace is controversial. Really the only people in this country who care about philosophy are academics, so Botton took this leap of popularizing philosophy, but I think he deserved to be acclaimed, not criticized. Better Botton than nothing at all, that's what I say.
Published 10/2/17
The Invention of Curried Sausage (1993)
by Uwe Timm
No, The Invention of Curried Sausage isn't *just* about that subject, of course. German author Uwe Timm packs A LOT of 20th century issues into his sparse 215 page novella (small pages, wide margins). The narrator is a writer living in Berlin, he returns home to seek out a woman who he swears was the first person in Germany to sell the now staple German fast food dish curry-wurst- basically a sausage sliced up and cooked, and served with a sauce that combines ketchup and curry powder. The narrator remembers buying it from her in the immediate aftermath of World War II, so he returns to track down the story.
As one might expect from a work of fiction, the truth is very complicated, and Lena Brucker, tells her story about World War II: an absent husband, a job working in a food distribution center during the war and her encounter with an AWOL soldier who she shelters during the chaotic days around the end of the war, and who she then tricks into staying long after the end of hostilities in Germany.
Again, as one might expect in a novel involving Germans and World War II, fraught with moral ambiguity. Timm has a light touch- particularly when compared with his contemporary German authors. I wouldn't exactly call The Invention of Curried Sausage a comic novella, but it has some funny moments.
Published 10/2/17
The Shipping News (1993)
by Annie Proulx
The Shipping News was pretty ubiquitous in the Barnes & Nobles and the independent book stores when i was in high school in the San Francisco Bay Area. Proulx won a Pultizer AND a National Book Award for The Shipping News, her spare, "darkly comic" northern gothic. Set in Newfoundland, (Proulx is from the US and lived in New England when she wrote The Shipping News), this book is one of those "international best-seller" type titles that move across national boundaries (Canada and the US, at least), and spawned a poor but well intentioned movie version in 2001 that starred Kevin Spacey as protagonist Quoyle, and Juliette Moore as love interest Wavey Prowse.
In 2017, The Shipping News still has an audience- and Proulx- thanks in part to the movie version of her short-story Brokeback Mountain, has a life time pass to publish or not publish as she desires. Most recently, she published a 730 page novel about a multi-generational family of French immigrants living in Canada over the course of 300 years.. Perhaps too ambitious for the Barnes & Noble crowd.
Proulx writes convincingly about loneliness and spiritual redemption. The Newfoundland location is memorably described, and The Shipping News is filled with convincing local detail. The double National Pultizer/National Book Award is rare, and I enjoyed The Shipping News but I'm surprised it did so well during award season back in 1993/1994.
The Shipping News (1993)
by Annie Proulx
The Shipping News was pretty ubiquitous in the Barnes & Nobles and the independent book stores when i was in high school in the San Francisco Bay Area. Proulx won a Pultizer AND a National Book Award for The Shipping News, her spare, "darkly comic" northern gothic. Set in Newfoundland, (Proulx is from the US and lived in New England when she wrote The Shipping News), this book is one of those "international best-seller" type titles that move across national boundaries (Canada and the US, at least), and spawned a poor but well intentioned movie version in 2001 that starred Kevin Spacey as protagonist Quoyle, and Juliette Moore as love interest Wavey Prowse.
In 2017, The Shipping News still has an audience- and Proulx- thanks in part to the movie version of her short-story Brokeback Mountain, has a life time pass to publish or not publish as she desires. Most recently, she published a 730 page novel about a multi-generational family of French immigrants living in Canada over the course of 300 years.. Perhaps too ambitious for the Barnes & Noble crowd.
Proulx writes convincingly about loneliness and spiritual redemption. The Newfoundland location is memorably described, and The Shipping News is filled with convincing local detail. The double National Pultizer/National Book Award is rare, and I enjoyed The Shipping News but I'm surprised it did so well during award season back in 1993/1994.
Published 10/13/17
Felicia's Journey (1994)
by William Trevor
Irish author William Trevor died last year, after ascending to "grand old man of Irish literature" status. His career was just short of the pinnacle of literary recognition- five Booker nominations but no win, a Whitbread Award (for this book), tons of formal recognition inside Ireland, occasional mention as a candidate for Nobel Prize for Literature (only for the living.)
Trevor, like many serious authors of the late 20th century, made a living writing about figures on the outskirts of society- here it is pregnant teen Felicia, a poor Irish girl from the provinces, who journeys to the Midlands of England to find the boy who knocked her up. There she encounters what might be called "an assortment of characters," but mainly consists of Mr. Hilditch, who, somewhat improbably appears to be a serial killer of young women.
You might call it another example of 90's vintage "Creepy Lit" although his Wikipedia page refers to "Gothic elements." Using criminals and criminal characters became very much in vogue during the 1990's, in my mind it is all traceable to the popularity of serial killers movies starting with Silence of the Lambs (1991), the international success of which must have inspired a generation of would-be novelists to really go for it when it came to creepy material.
Felicia's Journey (1994)
by William Trevor
Irish author William Trevor died last year, after ascending to "grand old man of Irish literature" status. His career was just short of the pinnacle of literary recognition- five Booker nominations but no win, a Whitbread Award (for this book), tons of formal recognition inside Ireland, occasional mention as a candidate for Nobel Prize for Literature (only for the living.)
Trevor, like many serious authors of the late 20th century, made a living writing about figures on the outskirts of society- here it is pregnant teen Felicia, a poor Irish girl from the provinces, who journeys to the Midlands of England to find the boy who knocked her up. There she encounters what might be called "an assortment of characters," but mainly consists of Mr. Hilditch, who, somewhat improbably appears to be a serial killer of young women.
You might call it another example of 90's vintage "Creepy Lit" although his Wikipedia page refers to "Gothic elements." Using criminals and criminal characters became very much in vogue during the 1990's, in my mind it is all traceable to the popularity of serial killers movies starting with Silence of the Lambs (1991), the international success of which must have inspired a generation of would-be novelists to really go for it when it came to creepy material.
Published 10/19/17
Trainspotting (1993)
by Irvine Welsh
Trainspotting is one book where the reader never need feel ashamed that he only read it after seeing the film. IN FACT, Trainspotting the book wasn't even published in the United States until the movie version came out in 1996. The book, like the movie, is known for it's affectionate, comedic look at a decidedly unaffectionate, uncomedic milieu, that of Scottish junkies and casuals during the AIDS era.
I was a fan of the film- saw it three, four, five times? Twice in the theater in the United States, once in the theater in London (the Prince Charles in SOHO), maybe twice on DVD. The affection I felt for those lovable Scottish junkies in college has diminished over the years. The book did not particularly impress me, specifically I've also been reading some James Kelman novels, and he does basically the same thing with much more swagger.
The book is unsurprisingly rougher than the hit film. In particular there is an omitted plot about the revenge one of the characters seeks against another street punk who infected his girlfriend with AIDS. Much of the dialogue in the film is drawn directly from the book. To me, there was little difference between the two.
Published 10/21/17
City Sister Silver (1994)
by Jáchym Topol
500 pages, and written in a "new" form of informal Czech that mirrors Anglo-American novels written in the "language of the street," City Sister Silver presents a challenge for ANY reader, and, if like, basically everyone in the Western world, you are wholly unfamiliar with Czech culture outside of Milan Kundera and Vaclav Havel, that challenge is all the greater.
You have to admire the editors of the 1001 Books giving the Czech language five books on their first version of this list, where Chinese has ZERO and all of the languages of the Indian subcontinent have ZERO. That is five books for a country with 10 million people, and zero books for China, with close to a billion. What you are telling me is that the editors in charge of 1001 Books to Read Before You Die, putting together their list in 2005, 2006, couldn't think of a SINGLE Chinese language book to put on this list, but giving the Czech's give, including three by Milan Kundera, seemed perfectly appropriate.
On top of the difficulties of translation and cultural specificity, the narrative style of City Sister Silver is close to being stream-of-consciousness, with little or no set-up to tell the reader who is talking, what they are talking about and how it relates to other episodes in the novel. At various points, Topol's translated prose evokes William Burroughs, the "cyber punk" of William Gibson, and early 20th century modernists like Joyce and Gertrude Stein.
The plot, I couldn't even begin to describe, except to posit that the main character is a man named Potok, that he has a girlfriend named Cerna and that both live in a post-Communist Prague where Potok is involved in "bysnys" that ranges from arms trafficking in the third world to the manufacture of snuff films. It seems, based on the tone, that drugs must be involved, but I couldn't point to a passage which says that. Some episodes: The recollection of the struggles of medieval Czech's, and the graphic description of the aforementioned Czech snuff film, stand out in the memory for their raw power, but I don't even know what to say after that, and I really question why this book was included.
City Sister Silver (1994)
by Jáchym Topol
500 pages, and written in a "new" form of informal Czech that mirrors Anglo-American novels written in the "language of the street," City Sister Silver presents a challenge for ANY reader, and, if like, basically everyone in the Western world, you are wholly unfamiliar with Czech culture outside of Milan Kundera and Vaclav Havel, that challenge is all the greater.
You have to admire the editors of the 1001 Books giving the Czech language five books on their first version of this list, where Chinese has ZERO and all of the languages of the Indian subcontinent have ZERO. That is five books for a country with 10 million people, and zero books for China, with close to a billion. What you are telling me is that the editors in charge of 1001 Books to Read Before You Die, putting together their list in 2005, 2006, couldn't think of a SINGLE Chinese language book to put on this list, but giving the Czech's give, including three by Milan Kundera, seemed perfectly appropriate.
On top of the difficulties of translation and cultural specificity, the narrative style of City Sister Silver is close to being stream-of-consciousness, with little or no set-up to tell the reader who is talking, what they are talking about and how it relates to other episodes in the novel. At various points, Topol's translated prose evokes William Burroughs, the "cyber punk" of William Gibson, and early 20th century modernists like Joyce and Gertrude Stein.
The plot, I couldn't even begin to describe, except to posit that the main character is a man named Potok, that he has a girlfriend named Cerna and that both live in a post-Communist Prague where Potok is involved in "bysnys" that ranges from arms trafficking in the third world to the manufacture of snuff films. It seems, based on the tone, that drugs must be involved, but I couldn't point to a passage which says that. Some episodes: The recollection of the struggles of medieval Czech's, and the graphic description of the aforementioned Czech snuff film, stand out in the memory for their raw power, but I don't even know what to say after that, and I really question why this book was included.
Published 10/23/17
Pereira Maintains (1993)
by Antonio Tabucchi
If I was to make a list of Italian language writers of fiction with a significant English language audience, it would be Umberto Eco and end of list. Tabucchi is, at least, another Italian language author who made it into the 1001 Books list, but I wasn't entirely sold on Pereira Maintains, set in Portugal during the Salazar dictatorship era. Pereira Maintains is squarely within the tradition of the European philosophical novel, where the protagonist quietly struggles with one or several issues of conscience. Here it is the involvement by older, single, newspaper editor Pereira with a younger writer, a radical, who has become enmeshed with the anti-Salazar opposition inside Portugal and the ongoing Spanish civil war outside it.
The title refers to the major stylistic feature of Tabucchi's writing- almost every thought by the protagonist Pereira appears after the introduction, "Pereira maintains..." as if it was appearing in a newspaper article and the narrator was interviewing Pereira after the events of the novel. At barely 200 pages, you don't get a long time to like or dislike the book, blink and it is over. FWIW there is a resolution, often lacking in other European philosophical novels of this sort.
Pereira Maintains (1993)
by Antonio Tabucchi
If I was to make a list of Italian language writers of fiction with a significant English language audience, it would be Umberto Eco and end of list. Tabucchi is, at least, another Italian language author who made it into the 1001 Books list, but I wasn't entirely sold on Pereira Maintains, set in Portugal during the Salazar dictatorship era. Pereira Maintains is squarely within the tradition of the European philosophical novel, where the protagonist quietly struggles with one or several issues of conscience. Here it is the involvement by older, single, newspaper editor Pereira with a younger writer, a radical, who has become enmeshed with the anti-Salazar opposition inside Portugal and the ongoing Spanish civil war outside it.
The title refers to the major stylistic feature of Tabucchi's writing- almost every thought by the protagonist Pereira appears after the introduction, "Pereira maintains..." as if it was appearing in a newspaper article and the narrator was interviewing Pereira after the events of the novel. At barely 200 pages, you don't get a long time to like or dislike the book, blink and it is over. FWIW there is a resolution, often lacking in other European philosophical novels of this sort.
Published 10/24/17
How Late It Was, How Late (1994)
by James Kelman
No Scottish author has ever won the Nobel Prize for Literature, but James Kelman is the Scottish writer most likely to be mentioned in connection with the potential to win that award. He famously, and controversially, won the Booker Prize for How Late It Was, How Late- the awards ceremony was marked by one of the judges cursing, calling the book crap and storming off the stage.
In a way, it's hard to believe that a book written in Scots working class (Glaswegian) dialect could even be controversial in 1994, but the controversy is a reminder of the differences between English/British literary culture and that culture in other places like the US, France, Germany and Japan. In other words, in 1994, the Brits were still a bit prudish. Still, it's hard to argue with the implied criticism of a Booker Judge storming out of the Award ceremony: Beauty is not much in evidence in How Late It Was, How Late, about Sammy, a petty criminal from Glasgow who wakes up blind after picking a drunken fight with a gang of policemen.
How Late It Was, How Late is written in a modified stream-of-consciousness style, modified in that the action is broken up over seven days and by the character sleeping or being unconscious. The Scottish tradition of literature involving an unreliable narrator goes clear back to the 19th century: See, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824), by James Hogg. The obvious genius of How Late It Was, How Late is in his melding of the stream-of-consciousness style- certainly not one in favor in the mid 1990's, with his prior interest in working class/under class consciousness and then introducing the sensory deprivation of blindness and it's concomitant impact on the stream of consciousness style and working class consciousness of the protagonist.
Which again is not to say that How Late It Was, How Late, tries for beauty. I mean it is beautiful as a work of art, but the subject matter- Sammy's blindness and semi-successful efforts to cope. Honestly, it's not hard- given the combination of viewpoint, skill and social concern, to imagine a world where Kelman does win a Nobel Prize for Literature. Except perhaps that he is from an unfashionable part of the world and for the very controversy that attended him winning the Booker Prize- he's resolutely anti-bourgeois and the Nobel Prize for Literature is nothing but bourgeois in their sensibility.
How Late It Was, How Late (1994)
by James Kelman
No Scottish author has ever won the Nobel Prize for Literature, but James Kelman is the Scottish writer most likely to be mentioned in connection with the potential to win that award. He famously, and controversially, won the Booker Prize for How Late It Was, How Late- the awards ceremony was marked by one of the judges cursing, calling the book crap and storming off the stage.
In a way, it's hard to believe that a book written in Scots working class (Glaswegian) dialect could even be controversial in 1994, but the controversy is a reminder of the differences between English/British literary culture and that culture in other places like the US, France, Germany and Japan. In other words, in 1994, the Brits were still a bit prudish. Still, it's hard to argue with the implied criticism of a Booker Judge storming out of the Award ceremony: Beauty is not much in evidence in How Late It Was, How Late, about Sammy, a petty criminal from Glasgow who wakes up blind after picking a drunken fight with a gang of policemen.
How Late It Was, How Late is written in a modified stream-of-consciousness style, modified in that the action is broken up over seven days and by the character sleeping or being unconscious. The Scottish tradition of literature involving an unreliable narrator goes clear back to the 19th century: See, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824), by James Hogg. The obvious genius of How Late It Was, How Late is in his melding of the stream-of-consciousness style- certainly not one in favor in the mid 1990's, with his prior interest in working class/under class consciousness and then introducing the sensory deprivation of blindness and it's concomitant impact on the stream of consciousness style and working class consciousness of the protagonist.
Which again is not to say that How Late It Was, How Late, tries for beauty. I mean it is beautiful as a work of art, but the subject matter- Sammy's blindness and semi-successful efforts to cope. Honestly, it's not hard- given the combination of viewpoint, skill and social concern, to imagine a world where Kelman does win a Nobel Prize for Literature. Except perhaps that he is from an unfashionable part of the world and for the very controversy that attended him winning the Booker Prize- he's resolutely anti-bourgeois and the Nobel Prize for Literature is nothing but bourgeois in their sensibility.
Published 10/25/17
Mr. Vertigo (1994)
by Paul Auster
Man, Paul Auster just never stops churning out books combining existentialism, whimsy and memorable characters. Mr. Vertigo is the first Auster joint I've seen that is set in the past- his current book 4 3 2 1 has portions that are set in the past, and this book has a narrator "looking back" from the present, but most of it takes place in the late 20's and early 30's. Walter Rawley is a motherless street urchin living in St. Louis. He randomly meets Master Yehudi, the son of a Hungarian Rabbi, who promises Rawley that he can teach him to fly. Yehudi and Rawley decamp to an isolated farm in Kansas, and a coming of age story ensues.
Again, as you might expect from a Paul Auster novel, Mr. Vertigo is the least whimsical book to revolve around magic that one could possibly imagine. Like all of his books before 4 3 2 1, Mr. Vertigo is short- under 300 pages. It makes for a comically compressed third act, basically all of Rawley's life between the late 1930's and the present, covered in the course of 50 pages. It practically invites the reader to skim, knowing that not much can happen in what remains of the book.
Like other books from this portion of the 1001 Books list, Mr. Vertigo is, at best, a marginal selection. Sure, it's fun- a fun read for an afternoon sitting in an airport departure lobby, but the whole enterprise seems truncated. I think I've made this observation before, but it often feels like Auster isn't trying particularly hard. I don't have a problem with it, but it seems like a consideration that would impact his canonical status, and the extent to which is represented within said canon. I mean one Auster novel a decade, that makes sense to me.
Mr. Vertigo (1994)
by Paul Auster
Man, Paul Auster just never stops churning out books combining existentialism, whimsy and memorable characters. Mr. Vertigo is the first Auster joint I've seen that is set in the past- his current book 4 3 2 1 has portions that are set in the past, and this book has a narrator "looking back" from the present, but most of it takes place in the late 20's and early 30's. Walter Rawley is a motherless street urchin living in St. Louis. He randomly meets Master Yehudi, the son of a Hungarian Rabbi, who promises Rawley that he can teach him to fly. Yehudi and Rawley decamp to an isolated farm in Kansas, and a coming of age story ensues.
Again, as you might expect from a Paul Auster novel, Mr. Vertigo is the least whimsical book to revolve around magic that one could possibly imagine. Like all of his books before 4 3 2 1, Mr. Vertigo is short- under 300 pages. It makes for a comically compressed third act, basically all of Rawley's life between the late 1930's and the present, covered in the course of 50 pages. It practically invites the reader to skim, knowing that not much can happen in what remains of the book.
Like other books from this portion of the 1001 Books list, Mr. Vertigo is, at best, a marginal selection. Sure, it's fun- a fun read for an afternoon sitting in an airport departure lobby, but the whole enterprise seems truncated. I think I've made this observation before, but it often feels like Auster isn't trying particularly hard. I don't have a problem with it, but it seems like a consideration that would impact his canonical status, and the extent to which is represented within said canon. I mean one Auster novel a decade, that makes sense to me.
Published 11/1/17
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1994)
by Haruki Murakami
Haruki Murakami was 15 years into his career as a novelist, including translation into English, when The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle cemented his status as a purveyor of international best-seller literature. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle was a hit both domestically, where it served the purpose of answering his (then) numerous critics that his fiction wasn't authentic; and internationally, where the 1997 one-volume translation became an "instant" best-seller and beloved companion to a generation of casual readers of literary fiction. In fact, Haruki Murakami is arguably a household name in houses where people read literary fiction.
And amazingly I've never picked up a Haruki Murakami book, despite the fact that I could "tell you" that he is a fan of jazz, cats and magical realism, all of which figure prominently in this and other books. But one incorrect assumption I made is that his fiction was "soft" or, perhaps "genteel," when in fact b has some of the most horrific depictions of 20th century war-time atrocities I've ever read, in addition to the jazz and cats.
The prose isn't dense, but the ideas are. The speculative fiction/magical realism elements are so tightly described that it seems more appropriate to emphasis the realism of the "magical realism" formula in the context of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. The translation allows for ambiguities, and as you make your way through this book, which was originally a set of three, shorter books in Japan, you realize that part of Murakami's genius is the way he lets ambiguity grow within the context of his story.
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1994)
by Haruki Murakami
Haruki Murakami was 15 years into his career as a novelist, including translation into English, when The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle cemented his status as a purveyor of international best-seller literature. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle was a hit both domestically, where it served the purpose of answering his (then) numerous critics that his fiction wasn't authentic; and internationally, where the 1997 one-volume translation became an "instant" best-seller and beloved companion to a generation of casual readers of literary fiction. In fact, Haruki Murakami is arguably a household name in houses where people read literary fiction.
And amazingly I've never picked up a Haruki Murakami book, despite the fact that I could "tell you" that he is a fan of jazz, cats and magical realism, all of which figure prominently in this and other books. But one incorrect assumption I made is that his fiction was "soft" or, perhaps "genteel," when in fact b has some of the most horrific depictions of 20th century war-time atrocities I've ever read, in addition to the jazz and cats.
The prose isn't dense, but the ideas are. The speculative fiction/magical realism elements are so tightly described that it seems more appropriate to emphasis the realism of the "magical realism" formula in the context of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. The translation allows for ambiguities, and as you make your way through this book, which was originally a set of three, shorter books in Japan, you realize that part of Murakami's genius is the way he lets ambiguity grow within the context of his story.
Published 11/4/17
Whatever (1994)
by Michel Houellebecq
A major difference between literary culture in the United Kingdom vs. the United States: the two biggest English language audiences, is the relationship with French literature. In the United States, French literature is essentially only known in translation, because the audience for French originals is limited to native French speakers and academics. In the United Kingdom, the roots of English/French bilingualism go back a thousand years. Many of the aristocratic families of England had roots and branches inside France, and England had a more direct relationship with French culture in the 17th and 18th centuries, when it was preferred to English in the halls of power throughout Europe.
Thus in England there is a small but important audience for French originals. Translations are just as important for reaching a wider audience, but it is the difference between a small and no audience for French originals. So in a project like 1001 Books- squarely based in London, there is a higher awareness of French authors, and this leads to a bigger audience for French fiction than in the United States, even though the US market is much larger.
Michel Houellebecq who is barely known in the United States, but a quasi-celebrity in the United Kingdom. He's known for courting controversy with his fiction- his most recent book, Submission, is a work of speculative fiction where France has become a Muslim majority and falls under Islamic "Shariah" law.
Whatever was Houellebecq's first novel- one can read it as an updating of The Stranger, or a French version of The Catcher in the Rye. The protagonist and narrator is a young software engineer, dispatched to the provinces in a multi-week training assignment. He is filled with ennui. Given the time period, you can see Whatever as a French version of Douglas Coupland/Generation X era young adult angst.
To his credit, Whatever is the first book inside the 1001 Books project to really convincingly portray the nascent "computer" culture of the 1990's (and forever after.)
Whatever (1994)
by Michel Houellebecq
A major difference between literary culture in the United Kingdom vs. the United States: the two biggest English language audiences, is the relationship with French literature. In the United States, French literature is essentially only known in translation, because the audience for French originals is limited to native French speakers and academics. In the United Kingdom, the roots of English/French bilingualism go back a thousand years. Many of the aristocratic families of England had roots and branches inside France, and England had a more direct relationship with French culture in the 17th and 18th centuries, when it was preferred to English in the halls of power throughout Europe.
Thus in England there is a small but important audience for French originals. Translations are just as important for reaching a wider audience, but it is the difference between a small and no audience for French originals. So in a project like 1001 Books- squarely based in London, there is a higher awareness of French authors, and this leads to a bigger audience for French fiction than in the United States, even though the US market is much larger.
Michel Houellebecq who is barely known in the United States, but a quasi-celebrity in the United Kingdom. He's known for courting controversy with his fiction- his most recent book, Submission, is a work of speculative fiction where France has become a Muslim majority and falls under Islamic "Shariah" law.
Whatever was Houellebecq's first novel- one can read it as an updating of The Stranger, or a French version of The Catcher in the Rye. The protagonist and narrator is a young software engineer, dispatched to the provinces in a multi-week training assignment. He is filled with ennui. Given the time period, you can see Whatever as a French version of Douglas Coupland/Generation X era young adult angst.
To his credit, Whatever is the first book inside the 1001 Books project to really convincingly portray the nascent "computer" culture of the 1990's (and forever after.)
Published 11/5/17
The Folding Star (1994)
by Alan Hollinghurst
It bears repeating that when it comes to embraces LGBT culture, the United Kingdom has lagged behind other English language countries like the United States. The "normalization" of gay male life in the British isles had to wait until well into the 20th century. Alan Hollinghurst is the premiere contemporary novelist representing the viewpoint of a "normal" gay man from England living in the late 20th century. His career has been representative of a serious literary author who hasn't had a break out cross-over hit. He's not well known in the United States. He did win a Booker in 2004, for The Line of Beauty, which is thematically similar to The Folding Star, in that it covers the experiences of a young gay man with a middle class background who grew up in England. A major difference between the two is that prize-winning The Line of Beauty takes place inside England and The Folding Star takes place in Flanders.
In Flanders, he falls for a variety of guys, a Moroccan street hustler type, his young tutee (he is making a living tutoring students in English.), a Dutch hustler who makes his living with dirty videos and phone sex. There is a healthy portion of unflinchingly depicted gay sex, perfectly normal, with no moral overtones. The sex though is just an aspect of the author's realism, refreshing, coming as it does during the great hey-day of post-modern lit. No narrative tricks, difficult to follow plot or multiplicity of voices. Hollinghurst does a good job of integrating his fictional present with accurate historical details about the role of the local community in World War II.
Flanders is the capital of the northern part of Belgium, which is Dutch speaking and has historical ties to the very idea of "greater Germany" that Hitler was so insightful to exploit. It's an area where questions of 20th century ethnic identity are very much at issue, and perhaps Hollinghurst is trying to draw a comparison to contingent ideas about gay rights evolving over time.
The Folding Star (1994)
by Alan Hollinghurst
It bears repeating that when it comes to embraces LGBT culture, the United Kingdom has lagged behind other English language countries like the United States. The "normalization" of gay male life in the British isles had to wait until well into the 20th century. Alan Hollinghurst is the premiere contemporary novelist representing the viewpoint of a "normal" gay man from England living in the late 20th century. His career has been representative of a serious literary author who hasn't had a break out cross-over hit. He's not well known in the United States. He did win a Booker in 2004, for The Line of Beauty, which is thematically similar to The Folding Star, in that it covers the experiences of a young gay man with a middle class background who grew up in England. A major difference between the two is that prize-winning The Line of Beauty takes place inside England and The Folding Star takes place in Flanders.
In Flanders, he falls for a variety of guys, a Moroccan street hustler type, his young tutee (he is making a living tutoring students in English.), a Dutch hustler who makes his living with dirty videos and phone sex. There is a healthy portion of unflinchingly depicted gay sex, perfectly normal, with no moral overtones. The sex though is just an aspect of the author's realism, refreshing, coming as it does during the great hey-day of post-modern lit. No narrative tricks, difficult to follow plot or multiplicity of voices. Hollinghurst does a good job of integrating his fictional present with accurate historical details about the role of the local community in World War II.
Flanders is the capital of the northern part of Belgium, which is Dutch speaking and has historical ties to the very idea of "greater Germany" that Hitler was so insightful to exploit. It's an area where questions of 20th century ethnic identity are very much at issue, and perhaps Hollinghurst is trying to draw a comparison to contingent ideas about gay rights evolving over time.
Published 11/8/17
The Master of Petersburg (1994)
by J.M. Coetzee
So very many J.M. Coetzee novels in the 1001 Books project. It's like they ran out of ideas in 1988 and just decided to pitch a dozen Coetzee titles into the mix. I mean, sure, the Booker winners, OK, I get it. And throw in another books a decade- what is that- five titles? The 1001 Books project has like, a dozen Coetzee books in the first edition.
The Master of Petersburg uses Dostoyevsky as his narrator and main character, returning to Russia during his German exile to investigate the circumstances behind the untimely death of his estranged step son. As it turns out, his son has fallen in with a rag tag bunch of (real life, historically based) Nihilists and he bounces between them and the Czarist investigators, who suspect his son of being involved with said nihilists. The version I read was an American paperback edition released after his 2003 Booker Win- in line with the idea that The Master of Petersburg is a second-tier Coetzee novel, which still makes it good enough to be in the 1001 Books project.
The Master of Petersburg (1994)
by J.M. Coetzee
So very many J.M. Coetzee novels in the 1001 Books project. It's like they ran out of ideas in 1988 and just decided to pitch a dozen Coetzee titles into the mix. I mean, sure, the Booker winners, OK, I get it. And throw in another books a decade- what is that- five titles? The 1001 Books project has like, a dozen Coetzee books in the first edition.
The Master of Petersburg uses Dostoyevsky as his narrator and main character, returning to Russia during his German exile to investigate the circumstances behind the untimely death of his estranged step son. As it turns out, his son has fallen in with a rag tag bunch of (real life, historically based) Nihilists and he bounces between them and the Czarist investigators, who suspect his son of being involved with said nihilists. The version I read was an American paperback edition released after his 2003 Booker Win- in line with the idea that The Master of Petersburg is a second-tier Coetzee novel, which still makes it good enough to be in the 1001 Books project.
Published 11/8/17
The End of the Story (1995)
by Lydia Davis
Lydia Davis is mostly known as the creator and master of "flash fiction;" stories that are one or two sentences in length. Here is an example:
Davis was also married very briefly to Paul Auster, and is also a well known translator of French fiction, including Proust. She's been a finalist for the National Book Award (2007) and she won the Man Booker International Prize in 2013- kind of a lifetime achievement award for otherwise non-qualifying (American) authors. All that said, The End of the Story was a drag- a middle class white woman tale of woe- about an academic who is trying to recall an affair with a much younger man. Literally everything about The End of the Story is sad, presumably on purpose, but I think the melding of the European style philosophical novel with the anomie of educated white women in the late 20th century is a disastrous formula for literature.
At this point, I could go half a decade without reading another European style philosophical novel/post modern novel written by a white, educated American. There simply isn't a lot of interest there, from a literary viewpoint, that hasn't been done a million times before. Add into the mix the emergence of a multiplicity of non white/educated/American voices within the space of the novel, and it just makes book like The End of the Story feel like a waste of time. Sad educated white woman, maybe read a Toni Morrison novel and tell me about sad then.
Also, flash fiction sounds dumb to me.
The End of the Story (1995)
by Lydia Davis
Lydia Davis is mostly known as the creator and master of "flash fiction;" stories that are one or two sentences in length. Here is an example:
The Outing
An outburst of anger near the road, a refusal to speak on the path, a silence in the pine woods, a silence across the old railroad bridge, an attempt to be friendly in the water, a refusal to end the argument on the flat stones, a cry of anger on the steep bank of dirt, a weeping among the bushes.
Davis was also married very briefly to Paul Auster, and is also a well known translator of French fiction, including Proust. She's been a finalist for the National Book Award (2007) and she won the Man Booker International Prize in 2013- kind of a lifetime achievement award for otherwise non-qualifying (American) authors. All that said, The End of the Story was a drag- a middle class white woman tale of woe- about an academic who is trying to recall an affair with a much younger man. Literally everything about The End of the Story is sad, presumably on purpose, but I think the melding of the European style philosophical novel with the anomie of educated white women in the late 20th century is a disastrous formula for literature.
At this point, I could go half a decade without reading another European style philosophical novel/post modern novel written by a white, educated American. There simply isn't a lot of interest there, from a literary viewpoint, that hasn't been done a million times before. Add into the mix the emergence of a multiplicity of non white/educated/American voices within the space of the novel, and it just makes book like The End of the Story feel like a waste of time. Sad educated white woman, maybe read a Toni Morrison novel and tell me about sad then.
Also, flash fiction sounds dumb to me.
Published 11/14/17
The Reader (1995)
by Berhnard Schlink
The front of Bernhard Schlink's 1995 novel The Reader has "Oprah's Book Club" written above the title and "#1 National Bestseller." It sold half a million copies inside Germany, made the New York Times Best Seller list in the United States(the first German language book to top the New York Times best seller list, says the wikipedia page), and spawned a moderately well-received Stephen Daldry directed, Kate Winslet starring film version that received five Oscar nominations. The Reader is a clear member of the "international best seller" genre of literature from the 1980's onward.
The Reader covers the familiar (to anyone who stays apace of German language fiction that gets translated into English and released in the US and UK) psychological territory of German struggling to cope with the aftermath of World War II, and their roles before, during and after that conflict. It would, frankly, be a little shocking to read a German language book from this period that doesn't- especially one that has been translated into English for an English language audience.
The crux of The Reader is the relationship between 15 year old narrator Michael Berg and Hanna Schmitz, a 36 year old woman who, when Berg meets her, is working as a conductor on the public transit system in a moderately sized West German city. Hanna has no husband, no children, no friends. The first portion of The Reader, dealing with Berg and Schmitz's technically illicit love affair is handled explicitly but delicately.
Next it is revealed that Schmitz has been accused of being a guard at Auschwitz and a smaller satellite camp- or rather, was- Berg narrates the trial portion from the present, as he remembers past events. The title refers to the fact that an important part of Berg and Schmitz' relationship was that she would have him read to her. Later, witnesses testify that as a Nazi guard, Schmitz would pick out weak inmate on the verge of being weeded out and sent to the death chambers and have them read to her, in the same way that Berg read to her as a boy.
Schlink provides a satisfying resolution that was obviously a huge part of the success of The Reader in it's translated form. I would say that the very commercial success it enjoyed taints in terms of long term canonical status. BUT if you are actually into Holocaust literature The Reader is a five star must, that definitely earns a place on the Holocaust lit shelf of your collection.
The Reader (1995)
by Berhnard Schlink
The front of Bernhard Schlink's 1995 novel The Reader has "Oprah's Book Club" written above the title and "#1 National Bestseller." It sold half a million copies inside Germany, made the New York Times Best Seller list in the United States(the first German language book to top the New York Times best seller list, says the wikipedia page), and spawned a moderately well-received Stephen Daldry directed, Kate Winslet starring film version that received five Oscar nominations. The Reader is a clear member of the "international best seller" genre of literature from the 1980's onward.
The Reader covers the familiar (to anyone who stays apace of German language fiction that gets translated into English and released in the US and UK) psychological territory of German struggling to cope with the aftermath of World War II, and their roles before, during and after that conflict. It would, frankly, be a little shocking to read a German language book from this period that doesn't- especially one that has been translated into English for an English language audience.
The crux of The Reader is the relationship between 15 year old narrator Michael Berg and Hanna Schmitz, a 36 year old woman who, when Berg meets her, is working as a conductor on the public transit system in a moderately sized West German city. Hanna has no husband, no children, no friends. The first portion of The Reader, dealing with Berg and Schmitz's technically illicit love affair is handled explicitly but delicately.
Next it is revealed that Schmitz has been accused of being a guard at Auschwitz and a smaller satellite camp- or rather, was- Berg narrates the trial portion from the present, as he remembers past events. The title refers to the fact that an important part of Berg and Schmitz' relationship was that she would have him read to her. Later, witnesses testify that as a Nazi guard, Schmitz would pick out weak inmate on the verge of being weeded out and sent to the death chambers and have them read to her, in the same way that Berg read to her as a boy.
Schlink provides a satisfying resolution that was obviously a huge part of the success of The Reader in it's translated form. I would say that the very commercial success it enjoyed taints in terms of long term canonical status. BUT if you are actually into Holocaust literature The Reader is a five star must, that definitely earns a place on the Holocaust lit shelf of your collection.
Published 11/14/17
Love's Work: A Reckoning with Life (1995)
by Gillian Rose
Gilliam Rose was a serious philosopher- English- of Jewish heritage. She played an important role in English language discussion of Continental philosophical figures like Theodor Adorno, Marcuse and Derrida. The was also diagnosed, at a young age, with ovarian cancer, and she died from it. Love's Work is a slim book about her experience. It is, of course, philosophical but also incredibly sad and moving, and clearly a work of literature with canonical value even though it is nothing like a novel or really any other book that the editors chose to include in the 1001 Books list. While I enjoyed it- particularly her matter-of-fact description of having a "stoma" after a cancer related colon surgery. I'll spare the uninterested the details of what, exactly, a "stoma" is, but if you know, you also know that it is probably one of the most disturbing things that can happen to a human.
Death is not something most people chose to think about- thoughts about death that last for long periods or that become overwhelming are a frequent sign of mental illness in the healthy, and as Rose points out in calm detail, there are many, many, many ways that a human diagnosed with cancer faces a frightening ordeal when seeking treatment.
Published 11/24/17
A Fine Balance (1995)Love's Work: A Reckoning with Life (1995)
by Gillian Rose
Gilliam Rose was a serious philosopher- English- of Jewish heritage. She played an important role in English language discussion of Continental philosophical figures like Theodor Adorno, Marcuse and Derrida. The was also diagnosed, at a young age, with ovarian cancer, and she died from it. Love's Work is a slim book about her experience. It is, of course, philosophical but also incredibly sad and moving, and clearly a work of literature with canonical value even though it is nothing like a novel or really any other book that the editors chose to include in the 1001 Books list. While I enjoyed it- particularly her matter-of-fact description of having a "stoma" after a cancer related colon surgery. I'll spare the uninterested the details of what, exactly, a "stoma" is, but if you know, you also know that it is probably one of the most disturbing things that can happen to a human.
Death is not something most people chose to think about- thoughts about death that last for long periods or that become overwhelming are a frequent sign of mental illness in the healthy, and as Rose points out in calm detail, there are many, many, many ways that a human diagnosed with cancer faces a frightening ordeal when seeking treatment.
Published 11/24/17
by Rohinton Mistry
I'm sure that when Salman Rushdie burst onto the international literary scene with his second novel, Midnight's Children, there were readers who were disappointed with the type of book that brought South Asia to the prominent attention of the Western literary world. Midnight's Children, was, by all accounts, event to detractors, an amazing book, but it was also very Western, what with the post modernism and magical realism, a book about South Asia written by an Author who understood Western literary culture very well. For these people, A Fine Balance, by Canadian-Indian author Rohinto Mistry, is probably closer to what they had in mind a sprawling (can there be any other book about South Asia) saga that evoked Dickens and Emile Zola.
A Fine Balance also squarely address the caste system, and the place of untouchables in Indian society, something that, to my knowledge Rushdie has never addressed directly in any of his fiction. A Fine Balance made a huge splash- only the second Canadian book to be a selection for Oprah's Book Club, and it got a Booker Prize nomination. I think simply the fact that it is the first book in the 1001 Books project to feature characters from the untouchable/dalit social class in India justifies it's canonical status. At close to 600 pages, the reader needs to treat A Fine Balance as one would a Dickens novel- you aren't just going to sit down and read it in a couple of sittings.
Personally though, I don't believe you can understand India without understanding untouchables, and their history and experience, and this is the only book I've found in my life that does it in the context of literary fiction, so there you go.
Published 11/24/17
Sabbath's Theater (1995)
by Philip Roth
In 1960, Philip Roth's debut novel, Goodbye Columbus, won the National Book Award. In 1995, 35 years after that win, he won for Sabbath's Theater. It demonstrates amazing longevity, and a continued popular and critical audience over the course of his entire professional career. I think it is far and in no way disrespectful to call Roth "the last of the (20th century) dinosaurs," in the sense that all of his books- and Sabbath's Theater is a particularly acerbic example, feature privileged white men abusing and harassing everyone around them. He was able to smoothly adapt the arrival of post-modernism without missing a beat, but he didn't start writing books about oppressed third world natives fighting faceless corporations, or underprivileged groups in the United States, he simply incorporated the technique to make his reoccurring themes more powerful.
Mickey Sabbath is the protagonist and narrator of Sabbath's Theater, he's a falstaffian figure who achieved brief notoriety in the 1960's when he was arrested in New York City for an "obscene puppet show," failed to live up to his early promise, then devoted the rest of his life to womanizing and making the women in his life miserable with his behavior. Whooo de doo, am I right? Reading Sabbath's Theater in the aftermath of the recent dialogue over sexual harassment/abuse by men of power carries with it some uncomfortable moments. Even after finishing the book it was unclear to me whether Roth meant us to hate Sabbath or empathize with him. He seemed pretty despicable to me. The ability to carry the book on the back of such a jerk is one of the characteristics of Roth's fiction which sets him apart.
Sabbath's Theater (1995)
by Philip Roth
In 1960, Philip Roth's debut novel, Goodbye Columbus, won the National Book Award. In 1995, 35 years after that win, he won for Sabbath's Theater. It demonstrates amazing longevity, and a continued popular and critical audience over the course of his entire professional career. I think it is far and in no way disrespectful to call Roth "the last of the (20th century) dinosaurs," in the sense that all of his books- and Sabbath's Theater is a particularly acerbic example, feature privileged white men abusing and harassing everyone around them. He was able to smoothly adapt the arrival of post-modernism without missing a beat, but he didn't start writing books about oppressed third world natives fighting faceless corporations, or underprivileged groups in the United States, he simply incorporated the technique to make his reoccurring themes more powerful.
Mickey Sabbath is the protagonist and narrator of Sabbath's Theater, he's a falstaffian figure who achieved brief notoriety in the 1960's when he was arrested in New York City for an "obscene puppet show," failed to live up to his early promise, then devoted the rest of his life to womanizing and making the women in his life miserable with his behavior. Whooo de doo, am I right? Reading Sabbath's Theater in the aftermath of the recent dialogue over sexual harassment/abuse by men of power carries with it some uncomfortable moments. Even after finishing the book it was unclear to me whether Roth meant us to hate Sabbath or empathize with him. He seemed pretty despicable to me. The ability to carry the book on the back of such a jerk is one of the characteristics of Roth's fiction which sets him apart.
Published 11/25/17
The Unconsoled (1995)
by Kazuo Ishiguro
2017 Nobel Prize for Literature winner Kazuo Ishiguro is not prolific when it comes to his output. The Unconsoled was published in 1995, more than six years after The Remains of the Day signaled his real arrival on the international literary stage (The Remains of the Day was his third novel, after A Pale View of the Hills (1982) and An Artist of the Floating World (1986). Upon publication, The Unconsoled was reviewed with bafflement. View positive reviews were forthcoming, many critics called The Unconsoled incomprehensible. A decade later, the tide shifted, and The Unconsoled was making it onto many "best of the century" type lists. Now of course, we have The Nobel Prize for Literature as well as the many stylistic and thematic similarities between The Unconsoled and The Buried Giant, the last novel Ishiguro wrote before he on the Nobel Prize.
Set in an unnamed Central European city that mostly resembles Vienna, The Unconsoled follows world-renowned pianist Ryder as he arrives into town to give an important performance. That one sentence is just about the only fact that can be written about the plot of The Unconsoled without discussing Ishiguro's extraordinary use of memory in this book. Ryder isn't exactly an amnesiac, but he can't remember many, many important facts which confront him as he tries to "Make it the Greek," so to speak. All of The Unconsoled is shrouded in the same kind of (metaphorical) fog that drapes filmic representations of Vienna in films like The Third Man. The most amazing aspect of The Unconsoled is that the narrator and reader learn less as the book moves along. Confusion and disorientation seems to be the avowed goal of Ishiguro, and in that regard he certainly succeeds.
Connecting it to his other books, a reader can see that Ishiguro is concerned with the unreliability of memory. What are the consequences to our personality when we either specific memories, or even the ability to know that we have lost memories. And whether the reader enjoys the experience or not, it is impossible to argue that The Unconsoled isn't another worthy take on this theme. Fun reading though, it is not.
The Unconsoled (1995)
by Kazuo Ishiguro
2017 Nobel Prize for Literature winner Kazuo Ishiguro is not prolific when it comes to his output. The Unconsoled was published in 1995, more than six years after The Remains of the Day signaled his real arrival on the international literary stage (The Remains of the Day was his third novel, after A Pale View of the Hills (1982) and An Artist of the Floating World (1986). Upon publication, The Unconsoled was reviewed with bafflement. View positive reviews were forthcoming, many critics called The Unconsoled incomprehensible. A decade later, the tide shifted, and The Unconsoled was making it onto many "best of the century" type lists. Now of course, we have The Nobel Prize for Literature as well as the many stylistic and thematic similarities between The Unconsoled and The Buried Giant, the last novel Ishiguro wrote before he on the Nobel Prize.
Set in an unnamed Central European city that mostly resembles Vienna, The Unconsoled follows world-renowned pianist Ryder as he arrives into town to give an important performance. That one sentence is just about the only fact that can be written about the plot of The Unconsoled without discussing Ishiguro's extraordinary use of memory in this book. Ryder isn't exactly an amnesiac, but he can't remember many, many important facts which confront him as he tries to "Make it the Greek," so to speak. All of The Unconsoled is shrouded in the same kind of (metaphorical) fog that drapes filmic representations of Vienna in films like The Third Man. The most amazing aspect of The Unconsoled is that the narrator and reader learn less as the book moves along. Confusion and disorientation seems to be the avowed goal of Ishiguro, and in that regard he certainly succeeds.
Connecting it to his other books, a reader can see that Ishiguro is concerned with the unreliability of memory. What are the consequences to our personality when we either specific memories, or even the ability to know that we have lost memories. And whether the reader enjoys the experience or not, it is impossible to argue that The Unconsoled isn't another worthy take on this theme. Fun reading though, it is not.
Published 11/25/17
The Information (1995)
by Martin Amis
Martin Amis famously received a half million pound advance for The Information, one that was given to him because he dumped his old agent (and friend) for someone new, someone who got him a half million dollars. At the time it was reported to be the most money ever paid for a work of literary fiction. It cemented his status as a literary bad boy- the advance- and made him a figure of controversy in the more rarefied circles of literary fiction, the people who hand out the major prizes, the people who write book reviews. I'm not sure the controversy has ever been resolved- Amis has never won a major literary award, which seems suspicious for a guy who has commanded a popular and critical audience for decades on both sides of the Atlantic.
The Information is his "mid-life crisis" book about two authors, friends since childhood, who are both forty. Richard Tull is the main protagonist and narrator- he's the failure. His friend, Gywn Barry has achieved pop culture icon status on the back of his best seller, a work of vaguely spiritual post-apocalyptic fiction that has resonated with a wide segment of the book buying public, despite being crap. Coming so soon after Sabbath's Theater, another book about a failed getting-older artist wreaking his pathetic vengeance on everyone around him, it's hard not to wonder whether the hey-day of this sort of fiction has finally begun to recede. I believe The Information, like other books with this sort of protagonist is going to have a hard time aging. Scholars and canonists looking back on the 1990's are going to be looking to include more diverse voices, and sad white guys like Richard Tull will find themselves on the cutting room floor.
The Information (1995)
by Martin Amis
Martin Amis famously received a half million pound advance for The Information, one that was given to him because he dumped his old agent (and friend) for someone new, someone who got him a half million dollars. At the time it was reported to be the most money ever paid for a work of literary fiction. It cemented his status as a literary bad boy- the advance- and made him a figure of controversy in the more rarefied circles of literary fiction, the people who hand out the major prizes, the people who write book reviews. I'm not sure the controversy has ever been resolved- Amis has never won a major literary award, which seems suspicious for a guy who has commanded a popular and critical audience for decades on both sides of the Atlantic.
The Information is his "mid-life crisis" book about two authors, friends since childhood, who are both forty. Richard Tull is the main protagonist and narrator- he's the failure. His friend, Gywn Barry has achieved pop culture icon status on the back of his best seller, a work of vaguely spiritual post-apocalyptic fiction that has resonated with a wide segment of the book buying public, despite being crap. Coming so soon after Sabbath's Theater, another book about a failed getting-older artist wreaking his pathetic vengeance on everyone around him, it's hard not to wonder whether the hey-day of this sort of fiction has finally begun to recede. I believe The Information, like other books with this sort of protagonist is going to have a hard time aging. Scholars and canonists looking back on the 1990's are going to be looking to include more diverse voices, and sad white guys like Richard Tull will find themselves on the cutting room floor.
Published 11/26/17
The Rings of Saturn (1995)
by W.G. Sebald
Wikipedia describes The Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald, as "a hybrid of a book...combining fiction, travel, biography, myth and memoir." The framework is a walking tour that "W.G. Sebald" is taking in south eastern England. The Rings of Saturn consists of both text and pictures, some of the pictures are locales from the walking tour, photos illustrating some of the stories within the story and even a photo of the author himself. I might also add that "history" is an additional element, the relationship between the West and it's colonies recurs as a theme throughout.
I'm not sure what kind of audience Sebald has in the the U.S. it must be a cruel irony for German language authors that truly world-wide notoriety can only come after their books are translated into English, but the two languages are extremely close linguistically speaking, so perhaps that's a consolation. What can the reader even say about The Rings of Saturn. One, it's weird and that weirdness is the very reason people find it so interesting. Two, despite the weirdness, it's not hard to follow or understand like other works of experimental literature. Three, the setting of this German language novel in the English south-east is very much on purpose and links to the larger theme of the exploitation of the world by "the west."
The Rings of Saturn (1995)
by W.G. Sebald
Wikipedia describes The Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald, as "a hybrid of a book...combining fiction, travel, biography, myth and memoir." The framework is a walking tour that "W.G. Sebald" is taking in south eastern England. The Rings of Saturn consists of both text and pictures, some of the pictures are locales from the walking tour, photos illustrating some of the stories within the story and even a photo of the author himself. I might also add that "history" is an additional element, the relationship between the West and it's colonies recurs as a theme throughout.
I'm not sure what kind of audience Sebald has in the the U.S. it must be a cruel irony for German language authors that truly world-wide notoriety can only come after their books are translated into English, but the two languages are extremely close linguistically speaking, so perhaps that's a consolation. What can the reader even say about The Rings of Saturn. One, it's weird and that weirdness is the very reason people find it so interesting. Two, despite the weirdness, it's not hard to follow or understand like other works of experimental literature. Three, the setting of this German language novel in the English south-east is very much on purpose and links to the larger theme of the exploitation of the world by "the west."
Published 11/26/17
The Ghost Road (1995)
by Pat Barker
The Ghost Road is the final title in her Regeneration Trilogy, set during World War I and focusing on the treatment of shell-shocked/ptsd British soldiers during the war. Barker won the 1995 Booker Prize for The Ghost Road and the Regeneration Trilogy is well equipped to find long-term canonical status as a representative of state-of-the-art historical fiction.
It was quite a turn for Barker, who, in her own words was seen as a, "female, northern, working class" writer before she turned her hand to male characters and historical fiction. Ironically, none of her earlier work made the 1001 Books list. Calling the three books a "trilogy" stretches the term- there are some overlapping characters(pioneering psycho-analyst William Rivers), and certainly overlapping themes, but the trilogy tells three difference stories. The Ghost Road switches between the present of closing stages of World War I, biographical reminisces of private Billy Prior about his various sexual exploits, gay and straight, and lengthy flashbacks exploring the time William Rivers spent in Melanesia among a tribe of (former?) head hunters.
I found the portions set in Melanesia to be particularly compelling. The heavy gay theme was unexpected and wasn't part of Regeneration, the other book of the three that I've read. Being gay in early 20th century England was a hanging offense, and many English found sexual liberation in the otherwise horrific circumstances of the trench warfare of World War I.
The Ghost Road (1995)
by Pat Barker
The Ghost Road is the final title in her Regeneration Trilogy, set during World War I and focusing on the treatment of shell-shocked/ptsd British soldiers during the war. Barker won the 1995 Booker Prize for The Ghost Road and the Regeneration Trilogy is well equipped to find long-term canonical status as a representative of state-of-the-art historical fiction.
It was quite a turn for Barker, who, in her own words was seen as a, "female, northern, working class" writer before she turned her hand to male characters and historical fiction. Ironically, none of her earlier work made the 1001 Books list. Calling the three books a "trilogy" stretches the term- there are some overlapping characters(pioneering psycho-analyst William Rivers), and certainly overlapping themes, but the trilogy tells three difference stories. The Ghost Road switches between the present of closing stages of World War I, biographical reminisces of private Billy Prior about his various sexual exploits, gay and straight, and lengthy flashbacks exploring the time William Rivers spent in Melanesia among a tribe of (former?) head hunters.
I found the portions set in Melanesia to be particularly compelling. The heavy gay theme was unexpected and wasn't part of Regeneration, the other book of the three that I've read. Being gay in early 20th century England was a hanging offense, and many English found sexual liberation in the otherwise horrific circumstances of the trench warfare of World War I.
Published 11/29/17
Morvern Callar (1995)]
by Alan Warner
Scottish fiction is over-represented in the 1990's portion of the first edition of 1001 Books to Read Before You Die. Morvern Callar is the name of the book and the narrator. Warner set this and all his books in a place called "The Port" based on the town of Oban, on the west coast of Scotland. Thus, Warner represented a sub-region of an already established regional literature. Like, I believe, all the other representative of Scottish fiction from this period on this list, Morvern Callar is a member of the Scottish underclassed, an orphan, raised by a railroad worker, who, at the beginning of the book, is working a dead end job at the local super-store, and living with her boyfriend, an independently wealthy aspiring novelist.
Warner famously opens with Callar discovering the body of her boyfriend, who has killed himself as she slept. As one might expect of a young female character in a work of Scottish fiction, she deals with it a resourceful fashion, and the book goes on to tell a kind of hybrid bildungsroman/crime caper. Morvern is an appealing character, and Warner doesn't overdo it on the Scottish slang/language. At the same time it's hard to make a really principled distinction between Morvern Callar and better known books like Trainspotting, except to note that Morvern Callar is narrated by a woman and set outside of the major Scottish cities.
Morvern Callar (1995)]
by Alan Warner
Scottish fiction is over-represented in the 1990's portion of the first edition of 1001 Books to Read Before You Die. Morvern Callar is the name of the book and the narrator. Warner set this and all his books in a place called "The Port" based on the town of Oban, on the west coast of Scotland. Thus, Warner represented a sub-region of an already established regional literature. Like, I believe, all the other representative of Scottish fiction from this period on this list, Morvern Callar is a member of the Scottish underclassed, an orphan, raised by a railroad worker, who, at the beginning of the book, is working a dead end job at the local super-store, and living with her boyfriend, an independently wealthy aspiring novelist.
Warner famously opens with Callar discovering the body of her boyfriend, who has killed himself as she slept. As one might expect of a young female character in a work of Scottish fiction, she deals with it a resourceful fashion, and the book goes on to tell a kind of hybrid bildungsroman/crime caper. Morvern is an appealing character, and Warner doesn't overdo it on the Scottish slang/language. At the same time it's hard to make a really principled distinction between Morvern Callar and better known books like Trainspotting, except to note that Morvern Callar is narrated by a woman and set outside of the major Scottish cities.
Published 11/29/17
The Moor's Last Sigh (1995)
by Salman Rushdie
The Moor's Last Sigh was Salman Rushdie's next book after his fatwa-inducing The Satanic Verses. If the fatwa impacted any aspect of The Moor's Last Sigh, it escaped me. I was struck between similarities between this book and his recently published The Golden House- both books, ultimately, deal with the crimes of fathers and the way those crimes impact their families. The setting her is the familiar Bombay and the less familiar Cochin, an ancient entrepot for the East-West spice trade, a seat for the Portuguese colonists and destination for several waves of Jewish immigrants- both those from Spain and Iraq. The characters in The Moor's Last Sigh cover the gamut of familiar Indian ethnicity- but the major families are Portuguese-Catholic and Sephardic Jewish. Like many of his Hindu and Muslim characters, there isn't anything specifically religious about these, other than the occasional use of a scenic religious spot for a locale or intervention of a religious authority figure in some minor way.
Morares Zogoiby narrates The Moor's Last Sigh- the only son of Jewish Abraham and Catholic Aurora. Abraham, the factory clerk for Aurora's families spice warehouse. Zogoiby is an extraordinary character- with one club hand and the peculiar quality that he ages twice as fast as a normal person. The characteristics are evidence that Rushdie has entered a baroque period in his fiction, where the details proliferate to the point where they almost obscure the larger design of his fiction.
The Moor's Last Sigh is sprawling and panoramic, and I'm at a loss to consider a book written by Rushdie about India anything but. At the same time, there are similarities between Midnight's Children, Shame and this book. After his jaunt into heavy historical fiction resulted in a decade long death sentence, you can't blame a guy for making a strategic thematic retreat to less controversial areas, but two decades later it reads as less vital than his other books written before this one.
The Moor's Last Sigh (1995)
by Salman Rushdie
The Moor's Last Sigh was Salman Rushdie's next book after his fatwa-inducing The Satanic Verses. If the fatwa impacted any aspect of The Moor's Last Sigh, it escaped me. I was struck between similarities between this book and his recently published The Golden House- both books, ultimately, deal with the crimes of fathers and the way those crimes impact their families. The setting her is the familiar Bombay and the less familiar Cochin, an ancient entrepot for the East-West spice trade, a seat for the Portuguese colonists and destination for several waves of Jewish immigrants- both those from Spain and Iraq. The characters in The Moor's Last Sigh cover the gamut of familiar Indian ethnicity- but the major families are Portuguese-Catholic and Sephardic Jewish. Like many of his Hindu and Muslim characters, there isn't anything specifically religious about these, other than the occasional use of a scenic religious spot for a locale or intervention of a religious authority figure in some minor way.
Morares Zogoiby narrates The Moor's Last Sigh- the only son of Jewish Abraham and Catholic Aurora. Abraham, the factory clerk for Aurora's families spice warehouse. Zogoiby is an extraordinary character- with one club hand and the peculiar quality that he ages twice as fast as a normal person. The characteristics are evidence that Rushdie has entered a baroque period in his fiction, where the details proliferate to the point where they almost obscure the larger design of his fiction.
The Moor's Last Sigh is sprawling and panoramic, and I'm at a loss to consider a book written by Rushdie about India anything but. At the same time, there are similarities between Midnight's Children, Shame and this book. After his jaunt into heavy historical fiction resulted in a decade long death sentence, you can't blame a guy for making a strategic thematic retreat to less controversial areas, but two decades later it reads as less vital than his other books written before this one.
Published 11/30/17
Cocaine Nights (1996)
by J.G. Ballard
A book written in 1996 means that there are only ten more years left in the first edition of 1001 Books to Read Before You Die. It also means that the editors are basically guessing at this point, since there were plenty of authors writing books in 1996 who didn't make the canon until after 1001 Books was put together. The period between 1996-2006 reflects what people thought canonical in the present- that is a contradiction in terms, time being the one factor required before a true argument for canonical or non-canonical status is advanced.
Whether Cocaine Nights is or is not canon makes little difference to me; I just like to read J.G. Ballard novels, and the weirder the better. Cocaine Nights is weird in that it is a work of crime/detective fiction, with a travel writer older brother heading down to the Costa del Spain to examine the circumstances surrounding the arrest (and confession) of his brother over the deaths of five expats in a highly suspicious fire. Charles Prentice, the older brother and narrator, is gradually drawn into a world of petty crime, recreational drugs and be-spoke pornography, seemingly abandoning his mission and allowing himself to become corrupted.
In the end, it turns into classic Ballard, with characters espousing their theories of the coming "leisure society" and what it means. Considering that Ballard was writing before the internet, his hypothesis sound prescient- the idea of wealthy westerners living in antiseptic condos devoid of community or human interaction sounds very much like the world of today.
Cocaine Nights (1996)
by J.G. Ballard
A book written in 1996 means that there are only ten more years left in the first edition of 1001 Books to Read Before You Die. It also means that the editors are basically guessing at this point, since there were plenty of authors writing books in 1996 who didn't make the canon until after 1001 Books was put together. The period between 1996-2006 reflects what people thought canonical in the present- that is a contradiction in terms, time being the one factor required before a true argument for canonical or non-canonical status is advanced.
Whether Cocaine Nights is or is not canon makes little difference to me; I just like to read J.G. Ballard novels, and the weirder the better. Cocaine Nights is weird in that it is a work of crime/detective fiction, with a travel writer older brother heading down to the Costa del Spain to examine the circumstances surrounding the arrest (and confession) of his brother over the deaths of five expats in a highly suspicious fire. Charles Prentice, the older brother and narrator, is gradually drawn into a world of petty crime, recreational drugs and be-spoke pornography, seemingly abandoning his mission and allowing himself to become corrupted.
In the end, it turns into classic Ballard, with characters espousing their theories of the coming "leisure society" and what it means. Considering that Ballard was writing before the internet, his hypothesis sound prescient- the idea of wealthy westerners living in antiseptic condos devoid of community or human interaction sounds very much like the world of today.
 |
| The movie version of Silk starred Michael Pitt and Keira Knightley |
Silk (1996)
by Alessandro Baricco
Another example of the 1990's era "International Best Seller: Now a Major Motion Picture" genre, translated from the Italian, about a French "silkworm merchant-turned-smuggler" who travels to 19th century Japan to secure supplies of silk worms for a consortium of silk manufacturers in southern France. While there, he meets a girl-woman with "European eyes" who becomes his obsession.
There really isn't a whole lot to it besides that description. Baricco has a poetic/elliptical prose style that obviously attracted readers. Also, Silk clocks in at 130 pages with wide margins and triple spacing between lines, so it's a fast read for anyone with a junior high school education or up. I wasn't moved. Inexplicably, this is a core book of the 1001 Books list, having survived all revisions. Baffling.
Published 12/2/17
Fugitive Pieces (1996)
by Anne Michaels
Canada's second most famous poetess-novelist is Anne Michaels. With only two novels to her name she didn't quite go all in on the novel like Margaret Atwood (Canada's most famous poetess-novelist). Fugitive Pieces is the story of Polish-Greek Holocaust survivor Jakob Beer, a young Polish Jew rescued by a Greek geologist, and raised in Greece (during the war) and Canada (after.) A second part of the book is narrated by Ben, the son of Holocaust survivors, who knows Beer as the successful poet he becomes in Toronto.
When I know the author of a novel is also a poet, I expect certain experiences from the text. A quality of elusiveness, abstracted imagery, the absence of common narrative sign posts that tell the reader what to expect. Fugitive Pieces has all that and more- themes of trauma, grief, loss and memory (swiped that from the Wikipedia page for this book.)
I read most of Fugitive Pieces sitting in the holiday-heavy hellscape of the Brand Americana mall in Glendale, CA., waiting for my car to get serviced down the street. Holocaust and contemporary American mall Christmas decorations make for some awkward thoughts, particularly when many of the shoppers- heavy on Armenians, Persians and other near Eastern minorities, have experienced their own 20th century Holocaust experiences. Perhaps the Brand Americana mall is heaven, and we all died. Or maybe it's purgatory.
Published 12/7/17
Hallucinating Foucault (1996)Fugitive Pieces (1996)
by Anne Michaels
Canada's second most famous poetess-novelist is Anne Michaels. With only two novels to her name she didn't quite go all in on the novel like Margaret Atwood (Canada's most famous poetess-novelist). Fugitive Pieces is the story of Polish-Greek Holocaust survivor Jakob Beer, a young Polish Jew rescued by a Greek geologist, and raised in Greece (during the war) and Canada (after.) A second part of the book is narrated by Ben, the son of Holocaust survivors, who knows Beer as the successful poet he becomes in Toronto.
When I know the author of a novel is also a poet, I expect certain experiences from the text. A quality of elusiveness, abstracted imagery, the absence of common narrative sign posts that tell the reader what to expect. Fugitive Pieces has all that and more- themes of trauma, grief, loss and memory (swiped that from the Wikipedia page for this book.)
I read most of Fugitive Pieces sitting in the holiday-heavy hellscape of the Brand Americana mall in Glendale, CA., waiting for my car to get serviced down the street. Holocaust and contemporary American mall Christmas decorations make for some awkward thoughts, particularly when many of the shoppers- heavy on Armenians, Persians and other near Eastern minorities, have experienced their own 20th century Holocaust experiences. Perhaps the Brand Americana mall is heaven, and we all died. Or maybe it's purgatory.
Published 12/7/17
by Patricia Dunker
French intellectual Michel Foucault is one of those 20th century figures, like Freud or Einstein, who continues to inspire new generations, both with his actual ideas and also with his image. In his case, that image is that of the sex-positive transgressive male homosexual, as aggressive about asserting his particular sexuality as any heterosexual man, with a fondness for vagrants and criminals, the rougher, the better. It's this combination of intellect and danger that gives him such enduring appeal.
In the recently reviewed The Seventh Function of Language by Binet, Foucault appears as an actual character in his 1980's who-done-it. In Hallucinating Foucault, he does not appear in person, but he haunts the proceedings, which detail the activities of the unnamed narrator, a graduate student in literature at Cambridge University. The narrator's subject is French novelist Paul Michel (fictional), who appears as a kind of literary doppelganger, or maybe spiritual manifestation, of Foucault. At the beginning of Hallucinating Foucault, which is set in the "present," the narrator learns, through his girlfriend, known in the book only as "the Germanist," that Michel went stark raving mad and has spent the last decade of his life in an asylum near Paris.
Off he goes then, to meet and befriend the subject of his research. The description makes Hallucinating Foucault sound more off putting and pretentious than it actually is. It's one of those novels that will appeal to people who fondly remember the height of "post-modern" academic culture, and leave those on the outside incurious to investigate further.
Published 1/4/18
A Way in the World (1994)
by V.S Naipaul
V.S. Naipaul is another writer I think is underrepresented in the 1001 Book project. I get it, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature, but the lineage that connects him to Joseph Conrad, and his mixed treatment of the colonial experience, viewed as an apologist for the bad guys in some circles of contemporary literature, means that he isn't in the fashionable club, at least not as of 2006- which was five years after the Nobel- when the first edition of 1001 Books to Read Before You Die.
I find myself drawn to Naipaul, probably because I am also a huge fan of Joseph Conrad- and view Conrad as being really pivotal to 20th century literature. If you look at the interesting area of contemporary literary fiction as, broadly speaking, "the voices of dispossessed," narratives by people excluded from traditional literary fiction (basically everyone who wasn't an upper class/intellectual in Western Europe for most of history), you have to find a link between 18th and 19th century fiction where these groups simply didn't exist, and the voice of those people, expressing their own narratives.
That link is not, for example, the great modernists of the early 20th century. James Joyce never made it out of Dublin. Most of the high literary modernists were just as racially and economically privileged as the writers they sought to supplant. Conrad, on the other hand, was out there. And while it's true that he himself wrote from the perspective of a colonizer, at least there are characters and locations that turn out to be critical to the development of 20th century fiction- places in Latin America and Africa that form such an important part of the recent canon. The audience for Conrad was the audience for these new writers from different places.
Naipaul continues that progress. Again, V.S. Naipaul is not exactly a voice of the dispossessed, he's more like a Cambridge don who happened to be born on Trinidad. Regardless of his socio-economic status, in A Way in the World he is writing the story of a place- his native Trindad and the nearby areas of Guyana and Venezuela that few English speaking readers understand.
A Way in the World was marketed in the United States as a novel, but in the UK it was called a literary "sequence" which is a more accurate description of the combination of personal memoir, history lesson and exercise in creative writing that A Way in the World appears to be. Whether or not the narrator of A Way in the World is actually supposed to be Naipaul himself in unclear. I think the answer to that is no... but there is no denying that the narrator bears a mirror-like resemblance to Naipaul.
Naipaul only has three books in the 1001 Books list, all part of the "permanent" 700 book list which has survived all revisions. I would up that allotment to double that- six titles. Maybe more. I'm not sure A Way in the World would be one to add, but I'm determined to make my way through more of his books.
A Way in the World (1994)
by V.S Naipaul
V.S. Naipaul is another writer I think is underrepresented in the 1001 Book project. I get it, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature, but the lineage that connects him to Joseph Conrad, and his mixed treatment of the colonial experience, viewed as an apologist for the bad guys in some circles of contemporary literature, means that he isn't in the fashionable club, at least not as of 2006- which was five years after the Nobel- when the first edition of 1001 Books to Read Before You Die.
I find myself drawn to Naipaul, probably because I am also a huge fan of Joseph Conrad- and view Conrad as being really pivotal to 20th century literature. If you look at the interesting area of contemporary literary fiction as, broadly speaking, "the voices of dispossessed," narratives by people excluded from traditional literary fiction (basically everyone who wasn't an upper class/intellectual in Western Europe for most of history), you have to find a link between 18th and 19th century fiction where these groups simply didn't exist, and the voice of those people, expressing their own narratives.
That link is not, for example, the great modernists of the early 20th century. James Joyce never made it out of Dublin. Most of the high literary modernists were just as racially and economically privileged as the writers they sought to supplant. Conrad, on the other hand, was out there. And while it's true that he himself wrote from the perspective of a colonizer, at least there are characters and locations that turn out to be critical to the development of 20th century fiction- places in Latin America and Africa that form such an important part of the recent canon. The audience for Conrad was the audience for these new writers from different places.
Naipaul continues that progress. Again, V.S. Naipaul is not exactly a voice of the dispossessed, he's more like a Cambridge don who happened to be born on Trinidad. Regardless of his socio-economic status, in A Way in the World he is writing the story of a place- his native Trindad and the nearby areas of Guyana and Venezuela that few English speaking readers understand.
A Way in the World was marketed in the United States as a novel, but in the UK it was called a literary "sequence" which is a more accurate description of the combination of personal memoir, history lesson and exercise in creative writing that A Way in the World appears to be. Whether or not the narrator of A Way in the World is actually supposed to be Naipaul himself in unclear. I think the answer to that is no... but there is no denying that the narrator bears a mirror-like resemblance to Naipaul.
Naipaul only has three books in the 1001 Books list, all part of the "permanent" 700 book list which has survived all revisions. I would up that allotment to double that- six titles. Maybe more. I'm not sure A Way in the World would be one to add, but I'm determined to make my way through more of his books.
Published 7/9/18
The Clay Machine Gun (1996)
by Victor Pelevin
Only after I bought The Clay Machine Gun online did I discover that in America, the same novel was published as Buddha's Little Finger in the United States. Adding to the confusion, the Russian title translates as Chapayev and Void-so... three titles. The Clay Machine Gun is firmly rooted in the free wheeling era between the collapse of Communism and the rise of Putin-ism. You can see parallels to artists in Weimar Germany in the way Pelevin takes advantage of artistic license to fashion a dark and disturbing vision of the failings of that society. Like many authors writing in a less-free society, Pelevin also makes use of surrealism and allegory to craft multiple layers of meaning.
Here, the narrative bounces between time periods, sharing one narrator, a "Peter Void." Half of the book takes place in the time of Revolutionary Russia, where Void becomes the aide-de-camp of a Tibetan mystic/Russian Army General who posses the Clay Machine Gun/Buddha's Little Finger of the title- an ultimately annihilating relic of the finger of the buddha that holds the ability to make the entire universe vanish. If you consider that revelation a "spoiler," then more power to you.
The more contemporary half of the plot involves a present day Peter Void- confined in a mental institution, where he is told that the other half of the plot- about the Russian general during the Russian revolution- is a hallucination caused by some kind of multiple personality syndrome.
Pelevin also includes historical counterparts for Void's psychiatric ward companions- a Japanese hit man, a Viking warrior and a trans character who has a Strangelovian ride with Arnold Schwarzenegger. It is all realistically surreal, if that makes sense.
The Clay Machine Gun (1996)
by Victor Pelevin
Only after I bought The Clay Machine Gun online did I discover that in America, the same novel was published as Buddha's Little Finger in the United States. Adding to the confusion, the Russian title translates as Chapayev and Void-so... three titles. The Clay Machine Gun is firmly rooted in the free wheeling era between the collapse of Communism and the rise of Putin-ism. You can see parallels to artists in Weimar Germany in the way Pelevin takes advantage of artistic license to fashion a dark and disturbing vision of the failings of that society. Like many authors writing in a less-free society, Pelevin also makes use of surrealism and allegory to craft multiple layers of meaning.
Here, the narrative bounces between time periods, sharing one narrator, a "Peter Void." Half of the book takes place in the time of Revolutionary Russia, where Void becomes the aide-de-camp of a Tibetan mystic/Russian Army General who posses the Clay Machine Gun/Buddha's Little Finger of the title- an ultimately annihilating relic of the finger of the buddha that holds the ability to make the entire universe vanish. If you consider that revelation a "spoiler," then more power to you.
The more contemporary half of the plot involves a present day Peter Void- confined in a mental institution, where he is told that the other half of the plot- about the Russian general during the Russian revolution- is a hallucination caused by some kind of multiple personality syndrome.
Pelevin also includes historical counterparts for Void's psychiatric ward companions- a Japanese hit man, a Viking warrior and a trans character who has a Strangelovian ride with Arnold Schwarzenegger. It is all realistically surreal, if that makes sense.
Published 7/25/18
A Suitable Boy (1993)
by Vikram Seth
The first fact any potential reader needs to know about A Suitable Boy, Vikram Seth's post-Indian independence epic, is its length: 1349 pages in hardback, 1500 pages in the paperback(!) reprint(!) edition that I read after literally years of procrastination. The first comparison any reader or writer about the book is likely to make is to War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, which is slightly shorter than A Suitable Boy (1225 page) and was also originally published in serial format as supposed to A Suitable Boy which was both written and published as an extraordinarily long one volume novel.
A Suitable Boy tells the stories of several interlinked families who inhabit a fictional north Indian state with a strong hindu tradition and a substantial, even after post partition, muslim population. The horrors of partition haunt the events of A Suitable Boy, but they take place off stage- in the past of this particular book, which, for all its ridiculous page length occurs more or less in chronological sequence over the course of a year plus.
The length in this case, is the number of narratives that Seth weaves together, and the extraordinary depth of analyses he brings to topics as varied as the post-Independence national political scene, the politics of the literature department of a major Anglo-Indian University, the decisions of the newly independent Indian Supreme Court, issues in the Indian shoe manufacturing industry, and of course, the master narrative, revolving around the determination of a mother to get her willful college-educated daughter married to "A Suitable Boy" which in her case means a Hindu of equal caste, not too rich but not poor.
To say that the "central plot" of A Suitable Boy is the marriage plot involving Lata Mehra and her three suitors is like saying that War and Peace is about some battles in the Napoleonic wars. Lata and her marriage woes disappear for hundreds of pages towards the middle and end of A Suitable Boy, which is more centrally concerned with the "sub" plot involving Minister Kapoor, his conflicts with the Congress part of which he is a charter member and the adventures of his purposeless son, Maan, who is NOT a suitor for Lata, but who becomes a central focus of A Suitable Boy for the last 500 pages.
Seth's almost jaw dropping erudition in the context of a work of historical fiction about a confusing place like post-independence India is obviously a major attraction of A Suitable Boy. An American reader as unfamiliar with the actual events of 1950's India outside of works of literature is limited in the ability to fact check anything Seth says, but you could also argue that any inaccuracy is part of a complex artistic vision. Really, it is a world in itself but it feels so real that I found myself double checking that the places involved were, in fact, fictional.
Published 12/14/18
Fall on Your Knees (1996)
by Ann-Marie MacDonald
Replaces: How the Dead Live by Will Self (Reviewed February 2018)
The most surprising literary genre I've discovered exclusively via the 1001 Books list is "Southern Ontario Gothic" or you might call it Canadian Gothic. Coined in the 1970's, it describes a literature that is similar in theme and content to American Southern Gothic. Both genres focus on dark familial relationships and the dark side of otherwise bucolic non-urban environments (though many of Flannery O'Connor's short stories take place in a "town" environment.)
I thought for sure that Fall on Your Knees would be considered a canonical representative of Southern Ontario Gothic, even though it takes place in Newfoundland. Fall on Your Knees arrived in the first revision of the 1001 Books list as an "international best-seller" member, the Audiobook I listened to had "Oprah's Book Club" selection on the small jpeg that serves as a cover within the library audio app. It is a little puzzling that it wasn't selected for the original edition, since it was published in 1996, a decade before the first 1001 Books edition was published.
The book it replaces, How the Dead Live is an excellent candidate for de-selection since it scores an absolute zero on the diversity index, is very lengthy and not the best work of author Will Self. Fall on Your Knees turned into a surprisingly good listen but readers with some kind of incest trigger condition will want to avoid this book.
A Suitable Boy (1993)
by Vikram Seth
The first fact any potential reader needs to know about A Suitable Boy, Vikram Seth's post-Indian independence epic, is its length: 1349 pages in hardback, 1500 pages in the paperback(!) reprint(!) edition that I read after literally years of procrastination. The first comparison any reader or writer about the book is likely to make is to War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, which is slightly shorter than A Suitable Boy (1225 page) and was also originally published in serial format as supposed to A Suitable Boy which was both written and published as an extraordinarily long one volume novel.
A Suitable Boy tells the stories of several interlinked families who inhabit a fictional north Indian state with a strong hindu tradition and a substantial, even after post partition, muslim population. The horrors of partition haunt the events of A Suitable Boy, but they take place off stage- in the past of this particular book, which, for all its ridiculous page length occurs more or less in chronological sequence over the course of a year plus.
The length in this case, is the number of narratives that Seth weaves together, and the extraordinary depth of analyses he brings to topics as varied as the post-Independence national political scene, the politics of the literature department of a major Anglo-Indian University, the decisions of the newly independent Indian Supreme Court, issues in the Indian shoe manufacturing industry, and of course, the master narrative, revolving around the determination of a mother to get her willful college-educated daughter married to "A Suitable Boy" which in her case means a Hindu of equal caste, not too rich but not poor.
To say that the "central plot" of A Suitable Boy is the marriage plot involving Lata Mehra and her three suitors is like saying that War and Peace is about some battles in the Napoleonic wars. Lata and her marriage woes disappear for hundreds of pages towards the middle and end of A Suitable Boy, which is more centrally concerned with the "sub" plot involving Minister Kapoor, his conflicts with the Congress part of which he is a charter member and the adventures of his purposeless son, Maan, who is NOT a suitor for Lata, but who becomes a central focus of A Suitable Boy for the last 500 pages.
Seth's almost jaw dropping erudition in the context of a work of historical fiction about a confusing place like post-independence India is obviously a major attraction of A Suitable Boy. An American reader as unfamiliar with the actual events of 1950's India outside of works of literature is limited in the ability to fact check anything Seth says, but you could also argue that any inaccuracy is part of a complex artistic vision. Really, it is a world in itself but it feels so real that I found myself double checking that the places involved were, in fact, fictional.
Published 12/14/18
Fall on Your Knees (1996)
by Ann-Marie MacDonald
Replaces: How the Dead Live by Will Self (Reviewed February 2018)
The most surprising literary genre I've discovered exclusively via the 1001 Books list is "Southern Ontario Gothic" or you might call it Canadian Gothic. Coined in the 1970's, it describes a literature that is similar in theme and content to American Southern Gothic. Both genres focus on dark familial relationships and the dark side of otherwise bucolic non-urban environments (though many of Flannery O'Connor's short stories take place in a "town" environment.)
I thought for sure that Fall on Your Knees would be considered a canonical representative of Southern Ontario Gothic, even though it takes place in Newfoundland. Fall on Your Knees arrived in the first revision of the 1001 Books list as an "international best-seller" member, the Audiobook I listened to had "Oprah's Book Club" selection on the small jpeg that serves as a cover within the library audio app. It is a little puzzling that it wasn't selected for the original edition, since it was published in 1996, a decade before the first 1001 Books edition was published.
The book it replaces, How the Dead Live is an excellent candidate for de-selection since it scores an absolute zero on the diversity index, is very lengthy and not the best work of author Will Self. Fall on Your Knees turned into a surprisingly good listen but readers with some kind of incest trigger condition will want to avoid this book.
 |
| Johnny Depp played the lead in the Roman Polanski movie version of The Club Dumas by Arture Perez Reverte |
The Club Dumas (1996)
by Arturo Perez Reverte
Replaces: Tipping the Velvet by Sarah Waters
The replacement of Tipping the Velvet with The Club Dumas is the first true head-scratcher from the second edition. Sarah Waters is a trailblazer for LGBT themes in literary fiction, and she has shown a strong grasp of time and place in her historical fiction. The Club Dumas, on the other hand, is a literary detective novel that was turned into a movie called The Nine Gates, directed by Roman Polanski and starring Johnny Depp. It's obvious that there was a dramatic under-representation of Spanish language authors in the original 1001 Books list, but most of the authors who have been tapped are straight, white men, and they are often replacing socio-economic feminist and lgbt perspectives, thereby actually decreasing the diversity of the perspectives on the list.
Which is to say that there isn't anything particularly Spanish about The Club Dumas, which might as well have been written in Italian (a la Umberto Eco), English (America, Dan Brown) or French (The Seventh Function of Language by Laurent Binet). Truthfully, The Club Dumas is closer to the risible (but best-selling) Da Vinci Code than anything by Eco. The plot combines a genuine love for old books and 19th century french fiction with a dollop of devil worship and a pinch of sex. Of course I enjoyed it- glad I'd picked the Audiobook version- even it it was abridged, but I just don't see The Club Dumas as canon-grade.
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| Nicolas Cage played the eponymous Captain Corelli in the movie version of the book. |
Corelli's Mandolin (1994)
by Louis de Bernières
I supposed I avoided Corelli's Mandolin because I could only think of the Nicholas Cage starring movie version (with Penelope Cruz playing the Greek love interest)- 28% on Rotten Tomatoes. Also, I spent a year or so looking for a book called Captain Corelli's Mandolin- which is the name of the book in the UK and the movie version, but not the name of the US edition of the book. I read the Ebook- it took forever- Corelli's Mandolin is 550 pages in paperback, meaning more than a thousand pages read in Eformat.
At the least the book presents a marginally fresh take on a little known part of World War II- the Italian and German invasion of Greece, told from the perspective of an omnipotent third party narrator and a variety of characters: Corelli, the Italian Captain with the soul of a musician, Dr. Iannis- the local daughter, and his strong willed daughter Pelagia. There is also a galaxy of supporting characters and even interludes told from the perspective of historical figures like Benito Mussolini. The Author obviously took pride in his historical research- he says in much in an afterword, but at it's heart Corelli's Mandolin is a very typical "international best-seller" that deals with the theme of love during war-time.
Published 1/20/19
Santa Evita (1996)
by Tomás Eloy Martínez
Replaces: After the Quake by Haruki Murakami
Argentinian writer Tomás Eloy Martínez is another member of the Spanish/Latin American wave that arrived in the first revision of the 1001 Books list. I can't fault the move to diversify the 1001 Books list, but I wasn't impressed by this particular book, which blends fact and fiction in pursuit of the strange after-life of the corpse of Evita Peron after she died from cancer at 33. Most of Santa Evita is narrated by the Colonel, an officer charged with keep tracking of the corpse (although there also two wax copies of the corpse after Peron's fall from power.
There is also a fair amount of biographical detail about Evita: her childhood, her upbringing, her rise to power- even her sojourn as a struggling actress in pre World War II Rome- narrated oral history style by a variety of interviewees. The blending of fact/fiction is of course, very au courant, as is the idea that one can write serious literary fiction about Evita Peron without being cheesy.
Santa Evita replaces After the Quake by Haruki Murakami- an over represented author, though Japanese literature is over all underrepresented on the list. I wouldn't have picked Santa Evita is I was in charge of the 1001 Books list- perhaps another book by Martinez, but it seems to me that most of the Latin America/Spanish language books score an absolute zero on a hypothetical diversity index- except for the fact that they are written in Spanish. In other words, most of the selected authors come directly out of the mainstream of European literary fiction. Most of the perspectives are that of the well educated and male narrator.
Santa Evita (1996)
by Tomás Eloy Martínez
Replaces: After the Quake by Haruki Murakami
Argentinian writer Tomás Eloy Martínez is another member of the Spanish/Latin American wave that arrived in the first revision of the 1001 Books list. I can't fault the move to diversify the 1001 Books list, but I wasn't impressed by this particular book, which blends fact and fiction in pursuit of the strange after-life of the corpse of Evita Peron after she died from cancer at 33. Most of Santa Evita is narrated by the Colonel, an officer charged with keep tracking of the corpse (although there also two wax copies of the corpse after Peron's fall from power.
There is also a fair amount of biographical detail about Evita: her childhood, her upbringing, her rise to power- even her sojourn as a struggling actress in pre World War II Rome- narrated oral history style by a variety of interviewees. The blending of fact/fiction is of course, very au courant, as is the idea that one can write serious literary fiction about Evita Peron without being cheesy.
Santa Evita replaces After the Quake by Haruki Murakami- an over represented author, though Japanese literature is over all underrepresented on the list. I wouldn't have picked Santa Evita is I was in charge of the 1001 Books list- perhaps another book by Martinez, but it seems to me that most of the Latin America/Spanish language books score an absolute zero on a hypothetical diversity index- except for the fact that they are written in Spanish. In other words, most of the selected authors come directly out of the mainstream of European literary fiction. Most of the perspectives are that of the well educated and male narrator.
Published 1/25/19
Our Lady of the Assassins (1994)
by Fernando Vallejo
Replaces: Blonde by Joyce Carol Oates
Replaces by Blonde by Joyce Carol Oates?!?! Her best-selling 2000 novel about Marilyn Monroe which is probably the best fictional AND non-fictional book about that august personage? Blonde is the first cut from the original edition of the 1001 Books list that I've actually mourned. Blonde is replaced by Our Lady of the Assassins by Colombian (by birth)- Mexican (by choice) author Fernando Vallejo. I would put Vallejo at the top of any "add" list by virtue of the combination of Latin American and LGBT (Vallejo is gay) material, and it doesn't hurt that you find Our Lady of the Assassins at the top of any list devoted to the intriguing Spanish language literary genre narcoliteratura.
Our Lady of the Assassins centers around a narrator-protagonist similar to the author: Fernando, a 50ish writer-teacher (he calls himself a grammarian at several points) who is into young gay guys who kill for the cartels. Specifically, two different guys, the second of which kills the first. A reader expecting a contentious-conventionally moral-ethical approach to the numerous casual murders of innocent bystanders by the teen lovers of Fernando. If you look into author Fernando Vallejo, you can see that he espouses some unusual positions, including being antinatalism, basically being against reproduction, which seems like it shouldn't even exist as a philosophy given the importance of reproduction to the human race, but there you go. That attitude is present in Our Lady of the Assassins, in a moment of violence so shocking that I stopped to figure out whether there was anything strange going on with this author.
Our Lady of the Assassins (1994)
by Fernando Vallejo
Replaces: Blonde by Joyce Carol Oates
Replaces by Blonde by Joyce Carol Oates?!?! Her best-selling 2000 novel about Marilyn Monroe which is probably the best fictional AND non-fictional book about that august personage? Blonde is the first cut from the original edition of the 1001 Books list that I've actually mourned. Blonde is replaced by Our Lady of the Assassins by Colombian (by birth)- Mexican (by choice) author Fernando Vallejo. I would put Vallejo at the top of any "add" list by virtue of the combination of Latin American and LGBT (Vallejo is gay) material, and it doesn't hurt that you find Our Lady of the Assassins at the top of any list devoted to the intriguing Spanish language literary genre narcoliteratura.
Our Lady of the Assassins centers around a narrator-protagonist similar to the author: Fernando, a 50ish writer-teacher (he calls himself a grammarian at several points) who is into young gay guys who kill for the cartels. Specifically, two different guys, the second of which kills the first. A reader expecting a contentious-conventionally moral-ethical approach to the numerous casual murders of innocent bystanders by the teen lovers of Fernando. If you look into author Fernando Vallejo, you can see that he espouses some unusual positions, including being antinatalism, basically being against reproduction, which seems like it shouldn't even exist as a philosophy given the importance of reproduction to the human race, but there you go. That attitude is present in Our Lady of the Assassins, in a moment of violence so shocking that I stopped to figure out whether there was anything strange going on with this author.
Published 1/31/19
Deep River (1993)
by Shusaku Endo
Replaces: Pastoralia by George Saunders
Contemporary Japanese literature is more than Haruki Murakami, though you'd be hard pressed to find the books of Shusaku Endo at any English language book store. Deep River follows a small group of Japanese tourists on holiday in India, where each of the protagonists is seeking a different kind of spiritual peace. The three protagonists are Osamu Isobe, an older man searching for the reincarnation of his deceased wife; Numada, who lived through a hellish experience as a Japanese solider during World War II and who wants to pay homage to a pet bird he believes died in his place and Mitsuko Naruse, the main character, a divorced woman who is obsessed with an old college classmate who is in India.
Much of the action takes place outside of Japan, with India taking center stage and a trip to France by Naruse playing a prominent role as well. Deep River works well as an introduction to Endo- not even two hundred pages long, and with nothing that prevents the reader from accessing the text. At the same time there was nothing, other than the fact of the Japanese characters, that distinguishes Deep River from a dozen other writers of literary fiction in the 90's and 2000's.
Deep River (1993)
by Shusaku Endo
Replaces: Pastoralia by George Saunders
Contemporary Japanese literature is more than Haruki Murakami, though you'd be hard pressed to find the books of Shusaku Endo at any English language book store. Deep River follows a small group of Japanese tourists on holiday in India, where each of the protagonists is seeking a different kind of spiritual peace. The three protagonists are Osamu Isobe, an older man searching for the reincarnation of his deceased wife; Numada, who lived through a hellish experience as a Japanese solider during World War II and who wants to pay homage to a pet bird he believes died in his place and Mitsuko Naruse, the main character, a divorced woman who is obsessed with an old college classmate who is in India.
Much of the action takes place outside of Japan, with India taking center stage and a trip to France by Naruse playing a prominent role as well. Deep River works well as an introduction to Endo- not even two hundred pages long, and with nothing that prevents the reader from accessing the text. At the same time there was nothing, other than the fact of the Japanese characters, that distinguishes Deep River from a dozen other writers of literary fiction in the 90's and 2000's.
Published 2/6/19
Waiting for the Darkness, Waiting for the Light (1995)
by Ivan Klima
Replaces: Timbuktu by Paul Auster
Late 20th century European literature is a dour affair to be sure. Struggling to think of an angle for a review of yet another dour central European author, I thought to look at other authors listed under the European literature tag to check for dourness as a theme, and here is what I got:
Herta Muller: dour
Javier Marias: dourish
Jorge Volpi: dour
Orhan Pamuk: super dour
Ismail Kadare: dour
Slavenka Drakulic: dour
Knut Hamsun: dour
Halldor Laxness: dour
Laszlo Krasznahorkai: not that dour
Published 8/8/19
Kitchen (1988)
by Banana Yoshimoto
Replaces: The Folding Star by Alan Hollinghurst
I honestly feel like Kitchen, Banana Yoshimoto's early 1990's cross-over hit, was added after someone pointed out that the edtiors of the 1001 Books list had included a book by a French woman about living in Japan, but had managed to include not a single Japanese female author. Japan as a whole is basically represented by Haruki Murakami with a handful of other authors in the 1001 Books list. Yoshimoto is the first, and I think the only Japanese woman to make it on to the list.
Mikage Suraki is the narrator, she's a young Japanese woman stuggling to overcome the death of her beloved grandmother. She comes under the influence of a neighbor, Yuiche Tanabe, a young man a few years her junior, and his transgender (male to female) mother, Eriko Tanabe, who owns and runs a local gay bar. This is pretty progressive stuff for Japan circa 1980, which isn't especially known for embracing LGBT issues, and the laconic prose style makes for easy reading.
Yoshimoto has been prolific in her native Japanese, but almost none of her more recent books have been translated into English. Seems to me that puts her in the category of a one hit wonder, and not that huge a hit.
Published 9/4/19
Disappearance (1993)
by David Dabydeen
Every remaining title from the original 1001 Books edition is an event around here! David Dabydeen is a Guyanese author- with fiction, non-fiction and poetry books to his credit. Disappearance was extremely tough to track down- I ended up buying a paperback copy from the UK on Amazon. The obvious comparison as far as this novel goes- about a Guyanese engineer who is brought to the Southern Coast of the UK to help with a break-water project, is V.S Naipaul.
The engineer spends most of his spare time hanging out with Mrs. Rutherford- his landlord- and through her he gains knowledge about the local landscape and reflects on his own experience as a member of a nascent post-colonial elite in Guyana.
Dabydeen seems reasonably well known in the UK, in the US he's seems to be almost unheard of- I couldn't find a single review of this book on the first page of a Google search of the book title and author. I'm generally interested in the line of authors that starts with Conrad and continues with Naipaul. He seems like a solid one book contributor to the core 1001 Books list- I would read another book by him, but not sure I'd recommend this one to all but the biggest fans of Naipaul and post-colonial literature (I don't know any of those, personally.)
Published 3/8/20
Blindness (1995)
by Jose Saramago
I think Blindness is Saramago's biggest, and only, English translation "hit." It was published in the original Portuguese in 1995. The English translation was released in 1997 and the Nobel Prize win in a year later. The movie, which was a flop, but still a pretty massive cultural event (25 million budget) at the time, came out in 2008, with an attendant repress of the English language translation. In fact, the cover of the Audiobook I checked out from the Los Angeles Public Library was a "movie edition" though sadly not narrated by Mark Ruffalo (who plays "the Doctor" in the film) nor Julianne Moore ("the Doctor's Wife").
The Covid 19 outbreak has proven to be another reminder for the general reading public, with Blindness ranking just below The Plague by Albert Camus in Covid 19 cultural thinkpieces. Blindness takes place in an unnamed country that pretty much seems like "not Portugal," in a city that could be Lisbon and what happens is that everyone goes blind over the course of a month or so. The blindness is transmitted when non-blind people see the eyes of the blind- that probably rates as a mild spoiler I guess. The first group of people to go blind- including "the Doctor" are confined to an unused mental institution where nearly half the book takes place. The narrator develops a half dozen characters from this group: The first blind man, his wife, the doctor, the doctor's wife, the woman with dark glasses, the boy with a squint- all of the connected to the first blind man or the doctor, an a opthamologist who saw the first blind man.'
The hook is that the Doctor's wife turns out to be the only one in the whole country who maintains her sight, and she ends up as the central character of the book, with the other characters being dropped to supporting status. I haven't seen the film, but I have to imagine the more graphic imagery from the book- organized rape plays a significant role in the horrors of quarantine, and the graphic depiction of death rivals anything you'd see in a genre horror novel. It's easy to distinguish Blindness as a work of literary rather than genre fiction by Saramago's disdain for exposition- when one of the internees produces a small hand held radio, it is only used to confirm that there is no useful information to be had from the outside.
Published 5/26/20
The Virgin Suicides (1993)
by Jeffrey Eugenides
If you go to Bucket List Books page devoted to charting the changes in the 1001 Books list, you will find that the number of books replaced in the first revision (282) and the number of "core books" (708) you will find that there are only 990 titles listed. How to square that number with the 1001 Books series title? I'm not sure, and to this date I haven't found anyone else who has mentioned this discrepancy. Short of counting the titles in the original edition, I'm not even sure how to check the real number of books- maybe using the index?
I mention it because The Virgin Suicides is my 974th review from the original edition- I'd like to know if I'm only 15 books away or whether I have another 25 to go. I read The Virgin Suicides when it was released, and I'm pretty sure I have my paperback copy still packed away somewhere in my garage, or on the shelf in my law office. I'm not rereading it for this review, because.... I'm not a huge Eugenides fan. Even after Middlesex won the Pulitzer Prize in 2003- I think it took me about a decade to actually read my hardback copy of that book, and I didn't like it when I did.
I did enjoy The Virgin Suicides, and the movie that Sofia Coppola made. There is a healthy discussion to be had about how many titles Eugenides merits in a canonical collection of 20th/21st century literature- The Virgin Suicides is a clear pick for being his first book, but he's only published three novels- that seems incredible to me. Obviously, there is a strong argument to include Middlesex as both a Prize winner and on inclusivity grounds since it's about hermaphroditism. On the other hand, Eugenides is not himself intersex, and after those two books you've only got The Marriage Plot and his short story collection, making the argument for multiple representation much weaker.
Replaces: Cocaine Nights by J.G. Ballard
Waiting for the Darkness, Waiting for the Light (1995)
by Ivan Klima
Replaces: Timbuktu by Paul Auster
Late 20th century European literature is a dour affair to be sure. Struggling to think of an angle for a review of yet another dour central European author, I thought to look at other authors listed under the European literature tag to check for dourness as a theme, and here is what I got:
Herta Muller: dour
Javier Marias: dourish
Jorge Volpi: dour
Orhan Pamuk: super dour
Ismail Kadare: dour
Slavenka Drakulic: dour
Knut Hamsun: dour
Halldor Laxness: dour
Laszlo Krasznahorkai: not that dour
Peter Esterhazy: not dour
Antonio Munoz Molina: dour
Jose Saramago: dour
Milan Kundera; dourish
Jachym Topol: dour
Milorad Pavic: dour
I could go on, but as far as the English language market for European literature in translation goes, the experience of life under Communist dictatorships after World War II in central and eastern Europe is where it is at, and if you are not writing about that subject- good luck- try a detective novel withe supernatural overtones, perhaps, otherwise forget it.
I mean where is the joy in European literature? When do these characters ever get to have fun? To stop living in a morally compromised world of regret. European literature of the late 20th century reminds me of a color swatch you would see at a paint store that covers the spectrum of white or grey: a million different shades of grey. One of the merits of this area of world literature is that it gives a genuine underdog role to the kind of well educated liberal professionals who annoy when cast in English or American books. A bored yuppie in New York City can be a heroic freedom fighter or morally compromised protagonist in places like Czechoslovakia, Romania or Hungary.
That's the case here, where the main character is a former political prisoner who has rehabilitated himself all the way into a leading role in the first post-communist advertising industry in Czechoslovakia. It's hard to shed a tear for Timbuktu the novellla(!) which Waiting for Darkness, Waiting for the Light replaced in the first revision of the 1001 Books list. It's a novella, written from the perspective of a dog- that's what Timbuktu is. Hardly a classic and I'm at a loss as to how it snuck into the first edition of the 1001 Books list. There is no good explanation.
Published 2/6/19
The Twins (1993)
by Tessa de Loo
Replaces: The Romantics by Pankaj Mishra
Dutch literature makes another appearances in the 1001 Books list, with The Twins by Tessa de Loo. Controversially, The Twins replaces a book by a south Asian author. De Loo has experience limited success getting her books translated into English- The Twins is the only book to get translated and get it's own movie in English. Unsurprisingly, this book is about a pair of German girls- twins- who are separated after their parents die on the cusp of World War II. One sibling stays behind with cruel German family members, where she is indoctrinated into Nazi ideology and marries an Austrian member of the SS. The other daughter is sent to the Netherlands, where she is raised by a trade union Communist with a love for music and a tolerant disposition. During the war, where German twin Anna cares for and maintains a mansion being used to house German army officers, Dutch twin Lotte helps her family shelter a half dozen Jews, though not her Jewish fiance, who is deported and later killed in the camps.
There were a range of actual and literary responses to the Dutch experience in World War II. Given the close ties between Germany and the Netherlands, some favored the Nazi's. On the other end, Jewish citizens of the Netherlands were targets, and in between there was a wide swath of people- often left leaning types- who mounted a kind of passive resistance to Nazi rule that included wide spread sheltering of Jews. At least, that is the picture I get from the novels about the period written by Dutch authors. I suppose it is possible that the level of resistance is over emphasized at the expense of the collaborationists- those clearly on the wrong side of history. Twin Anna is a willing Nazi, but she defends herself against her twins accusation in their present old age dialogues within the book.
It all seemed pretty rote to me, and hard to justify, except in the sense that it gives the Dutch another list worthy author.
The Twins (1993)
by Tessa de Loo
Replaces: The Romantics by Pankaj Mishra
Dutch literature makes another appearances in the 1001 Books list, with The Twins by Tessa de Loo. Controversially, The Twins replaces a book by a south Asian author. De Loo has experience limited success getting her books translated into English- The Twins is the only book to get translated and get it's own movie in English. Unsurprisingly, this book is about a pair of German girls- twins- who are separated after their parents die on the cusp of World War II. One sibling stays behind with cruel German family members, where she is indoctrinated into Nazi ideology and marries an Austrian member of the SS. The other daughter is sent to the Netherlands, where she is raised by a trade union Communist with a love for music and a tolerant disposition. During the war, where German twin Anna cares for and maintains a mansion being used to house German army officers, Dutch twin Lotte helps her family shelter a half dozen Jews, though not her Jewish fiance, who is deported and later killed in the camps.
There were a range of actual and literary responses to the Dutch experience in World War II. Given the close ties between Germany and the Netherlands, some favored the Nazi's. On the other end, Jewish citizens of the Netherlands were targets, and in between there was a wide swath of people- often left leaning types- who mounted a kind of passive resistance to Nazi rule that included wide spread sheltering of Jews. At least, that is the picture I get from the novels about the period written by Dutch authors. I suppose it is possible that the level of resistance is over emphasized at the expense of the collaborationists- those clearly on the wrong side of history. Twin Anna is a willing Nazi, but she defends herself against her twins accusation in their present old age dialogues within the book.
It all seemed pretty rote to me, and hard to justify, except in the sense that it gives the Dutch another list worthy author.
Published 3/19/19
The Holder of the World (1993)
by Bharati Mukherjee
Replaces: Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson
Why would the editors of the 1001 Books project insist that readers take in the thousand page plus Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson, only to drop it two years later in favor of The Holder of the World by Indian-American writer Bharati Mukherjee. It makes sense to not include Cryptonomicon in the first place, because it is over a thousand pages, and because Stephenson doesn't surpass Pynchon in his conspiracy-minded re-telling of World War II history, and also because he doesn't surpass other canonical science fiction writers in terms of his world building, but if you are going to put it on your list, keep it there.
I guess this would be Bharati Mukherjee's hit, about a woman from Puritan Massachusets who relocates to India with her piratical husband and falls into the long running conflict between the English, the Mughal Empire and various Hindu led polities. This was India in the time before it became the Jewel in the Crown of the British Empire. Here, the English are just one among many groups vying for power. The Holder of the World is a quick read- maybe just over 300 pages long. If you understand the temporal back drop of the events, all the other events fall into place with a minimum of complications. A conventional narrative outside of the exotic setting, as it were.
The Holder of the World (1993)
by Bharati Mukherjee
Replaces: Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson
Why would the editors of the 1001 Books project insist that readers take in the thousand page plus Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson, only to drop it two years later in favor of The Holder of the World by Indian-American writer Bharati Mukherjee. It makes sense to not include Cryptonomicon in the first place, because it is over a thousand pages, and because Stephenson doesn't surpass Pynchon in his conspiracy-minded re-telling of World War II history, and also because he doesn't surpass other canonical science fiction writers in terms of his world building, but if you are going to put it on your list, keep it there.
I guess this would be Bharati Mukherjee's hit, about a woman from Puritan Massachusets who relocates to India with her piratical husband and falls into the long running conflict between the English, the Mughal Empire and various Hindu led polities. This was India in the time before it became the Jewel in the Crown of the British Empire. Here, the English are just one among many groups vying for power. The Holder of the World is a quick read- maybe just over 300 pages long. If you understand the temporal back drop of the events, all the other events fall into place with a minimum of complications. A conventional narrative outside of the exotic setting, as it were.
Published 6/1/19
The House of Doctor Dee (1993)
by Peter Ackroyd
Lee well know are his works of fiction, and I feel like The House of Doctor Dee represents a make-up for the fact that most of Ackroyd's bibliography falls outside the scope of the 1001 Books project. John Dee was an alchemist and proto-scientist/magician who worked for Elizabeth I- he was instrumental for the map making that preceded the age of exploration. The book alternates between chapters set in the time of Doctor Dee and the present, where Matthew Palmer has recently inherited the house.
Aside from containing more information about the practice of Alchemy in the Elizabethan era and well crafted descriptions of the house itself and the surrounding city of London, there isn't much to say about The House of Doctor Dee. Palmer is selfish and self-obsessed character, and Dee is revealed to be obsessed with the illusive prospect of turning lead into gold through alchemy.
The House of Doctor Dee (1993)
by Peter Ackroyd
I read a copy of The House of Doctor Dee a few years back, but I now realize that I never created entry for it on this blog. I'm down to the last 46 titles on the original 1001 Books, a few books I've read for this blog and not written about, most are books I've read before and then there are about a half dozen books which are essentially impossible to obtain in the United States. Peter Ackroyd is well known for his non-fiction, particularly biographies of English historical figures, and non fiction books about England.
Lee well know are his works of fiction, and I feel like The House of Doctor Dee represents a make-up for the fact that most of Ackroyd's bibliography falls outside the scope of the 1001 Books project. John Dee was an alchemist and proto-scientist/magician who worked for Elizabeth I- he was instrumental for the map making that preceded the age of exploration. The book alternates between chapters set in the time of Doctor Dee and the present, where Matthew Palmer has recently inherited the house.
Aside from containing more information about the practice of Alchemy in the Elizabethan era and well crafted descriptions of the house itself and the surrounding city of London, there isn't much to say about The House of Doctor Dee. Palmer is selfish and self-obsessed character, and Dee is revealed to be obsessed with the illusive prospect of turning lead into gold through alchemy.
Published 7/22/19
The Crossing (1994)
by Cormac McCarthy
The Border Trilogy by Cormac McCarthy focuses on two characters: John Grady and Billy Parham. Grady is the subject of the first book, Parham the subject of the second, and then both characters are in book three. The Crossing is the second book in the trilogy, and it's about the childhood and young adulthood of Billy Parham, the son of a small rancher in New Mexico, growing up shortly before World War II when the book starts, and then continuing through the beginning of World War II. Like All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing is a bildungsroman/coming-of-age story that mostly takes place in Mexico, and like Grady, Parham experience many and various travails while riding around on a horse.
Wolves, Native Americans, bandits, stories told by blind old men, conversations with half-crazed missionaries, a fetching underage Mexican girl as a love interest, The Crossing has everything a reader or listener expects from the second volume of The Border Trilogy. McCarthy is an awesome author for the Audiobook format- his style of narration is ideal for the spoken word, and I could listen to Cormac McCarthy novels on a loop on Audiobook. The Crossing is one of McCarthy's longer books: 432 pages, and it feels so- with the individual episodes stretching into novella length territory. The initial encounter between Parham and a wolf, which he kills and then attempts to return to Mexico for burial, feels like a book in and of itself.
I've lately become convinced that McCarthy is, in fact, my favorite author- simply if I consider the pleasure of his work, compared to the chore that other favorite authors like Pynchon and Roth can feel like at times. As I write this I'm listening to the third book of The Border Trilogy, and that will leave only his very earliest novels left. Basically, every book that McCarthy has written since 1980 has been a hit and a classic, and I agree on both counts.
The Crossing (1994)
by Cormac McCarthy
The Border Trilogy by Cormac McCarthy focuses on two characters: John Grady and Billy Parham. Grady is the subject of the first book, Parham the subject of the second, and then both characters are in book three. The Crossing is the second book in the trilogy, and it's about the childhood and young adulthood of Billy Parham, the son of a small rancher in New Mexico, growing up shortly before World War II when the book starts, and then continuing through the beginning of World War II. Like All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing is a bildungsroman/coming-of-age story that mostly takes place in Mexico, and like Grady, Parham experience many and various travails while riding around on a horse.
Wolves, Native Americans, bandits, stories told by blind old men, conversations with half-crazed missionaries, a fetching underage Mexican girl as a love interest, The Crossing has everything a reader or listener expects from the second volume of The Border Trilogy. McCarthy is an awesome author for the Audiobook format- his style of narration is ideal for the spoken word, and I could listen to Cormac McCarthy novels on a loop on Audiobook. The Crossing is one of McCarthy's longer books: 432 pages, and it feels so- with the individual episodes stretching into novella length territory. The initial encounter between Parham and a wolf, which he kills and then attempts to return to Mexico for burial, feels like a book in and of itself.
I've lately become convinced that McCarthy is, in fact, my favorite author- simply if I consider the pleasure of his work, compared to the chore that other favorite authors like Pynchon and Roth can feel like at times. As I write this I'm listening to the third book of The Border Trilogy, and that will leave only his very earliest novels left. Basically, every book that McCarthy has written since 1980 has been a hit and a classic, and I agree on both counts.
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| Japanese author Banana Yoshimoto (pen name for Mahoko Yoshimoto) |
Kitchen (1988)
by Banana Yoshimoto
Replaces: The Folding Star by Alan Hollinghurst
I honestly feel like Kitchen, Banana Yoshimoto's early 1990's cross-over hit, was added after someone pointed out that the edtiors of the 1001 Books list had included a book by a French woman about living in Japan, but had managed to include not a single Japanese female author. Japan as a whole is basically represented by Haruki Murakami with a handful of other authors in the 1001 Books list. Yoshimoto is the first, and I think the only Japanese woman to make it on to the list.
Mikage Suraki is the narrator, she's a young Japanese woman stuggling to overcome the death of her beloved grandmother. She comes under the influence of a neighbor, Yuiche Tanabe, a young man a few years her junior, and his transgender (male to female) mother, Eriko Tanabe, who owns and runs a local gay bar. This is pretty progressive stuff for Japan circa 1980, which isn't especially known for embracing LGBT issues, and the laconic prose style makes for easy reading.
Yoshimoto has been prolific in her native Japanese, but almost none of her more recent books have been translated into English. Seems to me that puts her in the category of a one hit wonder, and not that huge a hit.
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| Guyanese author David Dabydeen |
Disappearance (1993)
by David Dabydeen
Every remaining title from the original 1001 Books edition is an event around here! David Dabydeen is a Guyanese author- with fiction, non-fiction and poetry books to his credit. Disappearance was extremely tough to track down- I ended up buying a paperback copy from the UK on Amazon. The obvious comparison as far as this novel goes- about a Guyanese engineer who is brought to the Southern Coast of the UK to help with a break-water project, is V.S Naipaul.
The engineer spends most of his spare time hanging out with Mrs. Rutherford- his landlord- and through her he gains knowledge about the local landscape and reflects on his own experience as a member of a nascent post-colonial elite in Guyana.
Dabydeen seems reasonably well known in the UK, in the US he's seems to be almost unheard of- I couldn't find a single review of this book on the first page of a Google search of the book title and author. I'm generally interested in the line of authors that starts with Conrad and continues with Naipaul. He seems like a solid one book contributor to the core 1001 Books list- I would read another book by him, but not sure I'd recommend this one to all but the biggest fans of Naipaul and post-colonial literature (I don't know any of those, personally.)
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| Julianne Moore played the key character of "the Doctor's Wife" in the 2008 movie version of Blindness, the 1995 novel by Jose Saramago. |
Blindness (1995)
by Jose Saramago
I think Blindness is Saramago's biggest, and only, English translation "hit." It was published in the original Portuguese in 1995. The English translation was released in 1997 and the Nobel Prize win in a year later. The movie, which was a flop, but still a pretty massive cultural event (25 million budget) at the time, came out in 2008, with an attendant repress of the English language translation. In fact, the cover of the Audiobook I checked out from the Los Angeles Public Library was a "movie edition" though sadly not narrated by Mark Ruffalo (who plays "the Doctor" in the film) nor Julianne Moore ("the Doctor's Wife").
The Covid 19 outbreak has proven to be another reminder for the general reading public, with Blindness ranking just below The Plague by Albert Camus in Covid 19 cultural thinkpieces. Blindness takes place in an unnamed country that pretty much seems like "not Portugal," in a city that could be Lisbon and what happens is that everyone goes blind over the course of a month or so. The blindness is transmitted when non-blind people see the eyes of the blind- that probably rates as a mild spoiler I guess. The first group of people to go blind- including "the Doctor" are confined to an unused mental institution where nearly half the book takes place. The narrator develops a half dozen characters from this group: The first blind man, his wife, the doctor, the doctor's wife, the woman with dark glasses, the boy with a squint- all of the connected to the first blind man or the doctor, an a opthamologist who saw the first blind man.'
The hook is that the Doctor's wife turns out to be the only one in the whole country who maintains her sight, and she ends up as the central character of the book, with the other characters being dropped to supporting status. I haven't seen the film, but I have to imagine the more graphic imagery from the book- organized rape plays a significant role in the horrors of quarantine, and the graphic depiction of death rivals anything you'd see in a genre horror novel. It's easy to distinguish Blindness as a work of literary rather than genre fiction by Saramago's disdain for exposition- when one of the internees produces a small hand held radio, it is only used to confirm that there is no useful information to be had from the outside.
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| Photo from the Sofia Coppola movie version of The Virgin Suicides. |
The Virgin Suicides (1993)
by Jeffrey Eugenides
If you go to Bucket List Books page devoted to charting the changes in the 1001 Books list, you will find that the number of books replaced in the first revision (282) and the number of "core books" (708) you will find that there are only 990 titles listed. How to square that number with the 1001 Books series title? I'm not sure, and to this date I haven't found anyone else who has mentioned this discrepancy. Short of counting the titles in the original edition, I'm not even sure how to check the real number of books- maybe using the index?
I mention it because The Virgin Suicides is my 974th review from the original edition- I'd like to know if I'm only 15 books away or whether I have another 25 to go. I read The Virgin Suicides when it was released, and I'm pretty sure I have my paperback copy still packed away somewhere in my garage, or on the shelf in my law office. I'm not rereading it for this review, because.... I'm not a huge Eugenides fan. Even after Middlesex won the Pulitzer Prize in 2003- I think it took me about a decade to actually read my hardback copy of that book, and I didn't like it when I did.
I did enjoy The Virgin Suicides, and the movie that Sofia Coppola made. There is a healthy discussion to be had about how many titles Eugenides merits in a canonical collection of 20th/21st century literature- The Virgin Suicides is a clear pick for being his first book, but he's only published three novels- that seems incredible to me. Obviously, there is a strong argument to include Middlesex as both a Prize winner and on inclusivity grounds since it's about hermaphroditism. On the other hand, Eugenides is not himself intersex, and after those two books you've only got The Marriage Plot and his short story collection, making the argument for multiple representation much weaker.
Published 1/5/21
The New Life (1994)
by Orhan Pamuk
My Audiobook intensive tour through the oeuvre of Turkish author (and 2006 Nobel Prize winner) Orhan Pamuk continues, driven by the frequent availability of all his novels translated into English and widely available within the Los Angeles Public Library system (Turks are not so popular in this Armenian intensive town.) I found The New Life largely incomprehensible- an opinion mirrored on the Wikipedia page for the book. John Lee's capable narration didn't help.
It took me months to make it through the eleven hour Audiobook and I would advise anyone touring through Pamuk's bibliography to consider skipping this book. It is hard to even write a capsule summary of the plot- there is a book, it changes those who read it, Osman, the protagonist falls for a woman who is a fellow reader of the book and he ends up on a bus all over Turkey trying to locate a fellow reader. There is a bus accident, assumed identifies, he finds the author of the book. No idea what any of it means or is supposed to mean.
Published 1/25/21
The Discovery of Heaven (1992)
by Harry Mulisch
Replaces: Cocaine Nights by J.G. Ballard
Over 700 pages, The Discovery of Heaven has a great reputation as the greatest Dutch language novel of its generation, but I found the plot: A laborious construction about a plot by literal Angels to restore the 10 commandments to the Holy Land by intervening in the lives of a pair of Dutch intellectuals living in the 1960's and 70's; to be tedious to the point of incoherent.
Luckily I managed to find a copy of the English translation in a nearby Little Library, otherwise I doubt I ever would have got to it. My description makes it sound like there might be some interesting magical realism angle, but quite the opposite, even the dialogue BETWEEN ANGELS seems bogged down in the idiom of over-educated Western Europeans. No doubt there are interesting novels coming out of the Netherlands- the 2020 Booker International winner was a young Dutch writer, but as far as this being THE Dutch novel of a generation, I would have to demur.
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