Big Fish (1998) by Daniel Wallace

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Big Fish (1998)

by Daniel Wallace

Spectre, Alabama

Alabama: 2/18

  My progress on the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America, Chapter 5, Blues & Bayous, Deltas and Coasts, which covers the swath of states from Georgia to Louisiana with Florida tacked on... has slowed to a proverbial crawl.  I'd place most of the blame of the seemingly endless jury trial I'm doing in Los Angeles- between the actual time and energy spent on the case AND the fact that the drive is only 20 minutes instead of the 2/3 hours between San Diego and LA that I'm used to- it's a challenge both to find the time/energy to actually read and listen to Audiobooks as well.

  Add to that the actual sadness of this part of America, between the struggles of African Americans AND socioeconomically disadvantaged whites, there is little sparkle, hope or beauty.   I picked Big Fish as a jail read because it seemed easy and I'd remembered the dumb Tim Burton movie.  I wasn't disappointed- even going so far as to get the special movie version of the book complete with proposed discussion prompts for a hypothetical book group discussion.

  Big Fish is a "fun" read (though in a sentimental, treacly way that emphasizes the importance of family ties) in that it consists of a series of "tall tales."  At the very least, there is no child abuse or overt racism in this novel. 

Krasznahorkai Wins 2025 Nobel Prize in Literature

 Krasznahorkai Wins 2025 Nobel Prize in Literature

   Can't say I'm surprised at the announcement of the 2025 Nobel Prize in Literature. Krasznahorkai has been in the top five of the oddsmakers for years and he won the last career-spanning (vs. single title) International Booker Prize about a decade back.  My encounter with him was spurred by the 1,001 Novels to Read Before You Die Project, where my 2017 review of his 1989 novel, The Melancholy Resistance, memorably noted that:

     "Krasznahorkai is the second Hungarian language author to make the 1001 Books list.  The other author is Nobel Prize winner Imre Kertesz, so that makes Krasznahorkai the SECOND most famous Hungarian language novelist in English."

   That's the level of insight readers can expect from this blog. Krasznahorkai is a classic Nobel pick- he's popular in French and German, isn't popular in English and has a high-modernist style that appeals to Nobel jury members who take themselves pretty darn seriously.  I think they(the Nobel committee) feel like picking a cis white writer from a central European country who doesn't write in English, French or German is a diversity pick.

   But this one has been a long time coming.  I don't think it will make a difference in America- no one wants to read these books.

Published 5/30/17
The Melancholy Resistance (1989)
 by László Krasznahorkai

   Krasznahorkai is the second Hungarian language author to make the 1001 Books list.  The other author is Nobel Prize winner Imre Kertesz, so that makes Krasznahorkai the SECOND most famous Hungarian language novelist in English.   Unlike Fatelessness, Kerteszs' straight forward Holocaust memoir, The Melancholy of Resistance is an avant-garde, paragraph-less fantasia about a nameless town plagued by a mysterious circus, a dead whale and a shadowy mob of hooligans.  Did I mention that this book has no paragraphs?

  Aside from the total lack of paragraphs- there are chapters, thank god, The Melancholy Resistance avoids any kind of signaling to the reader so that the story unspools "in real time."

Published 4/28/18
The World Goes On (2017)
 Laszlo Krasznahorkai

   The World Goes On, by Hungarian author Laszlo Krasznahorkai, is the third book from the 2018 Booker International Prize list of nominees, and the second book from the six-title short list.  I'm on the waiting list for a third short list title, Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmad Saadawi.  I'm frankly unsure if I'm going to be able to track down the other three titles.   The World Goes On is a collection of short stories, about three hundred pages long, and a terrible, terrible, terrible book to read on a Kindle.  Reading the stories in The World Goes On at time resembles Samuel Beckett, who is actually the narrator of one of the stories in the book.  Another reference point is Portuguese author Jose Saramago.  Stretching back further in time, Borges.

  Listing those three authors as reference points is about as complete a description as I can give without simply description the action (or more often) lack of action in each story.  The marketing and critical material that accompanies this release includes frequent use of the term "apocalyptic," and I suppose you could say the same thing about Beckett, so in that regard, it's true, but for heaven's sake don't expect anything exciting to happen.

  Each story has a puzzle aspect that requires the reader to actively consider, what, exactly, is happening.  That is a hallmark of experimental fiction, and a result, The World Goes On fits squarely within that tradition, without innovating- it's like a skilled homage.   Krasznahorkai was omitted from the 1001 Books list- you could argue that taking one of his books, instead of Celestial Harmonies by Peter Esterhazy would be a more fitting representative for late twentieth century/early 21st century central European fiction in a representative canon.   Not this book though.  And I wouldn't think The World Goes On wins the 2018 Booker International Prize, either.

Published 4/22/20
Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming (2019)
 by Laszlo Krasznahorkai

   Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming (2019) by Laszlo Krasznahorkai won the inaugural National Book Award for Translated Fiction.   The English translation was published by New Directions- one of my favorite houses.   It is easy to see why it won, because this is the kind of book: difficult and complicated to follow, that prize juries love.   Just completing it feels like an accomplishment because of Krasznahorkai's style:   Pages long paragraphs, page long sentences, a half dozen narrators, shifting between narrators between paragraphs and a surfeit of events within the book that take place off the page, leaving the reader to piece together what happened.

  The basic idea is that Baron Wencknheim- a dissolute Hungarian royal who has spent his entire adult life in exile in Argentina, returns home to small-town Hungary, where the locals await him with a mixture of excitement and trepidation. The Baron is a bit of a wastrel, but no one in Hungary knows this, and the clash between expectation and reality provides much of the impetus of the pot.

    Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming isn't an easy book to describe, other than the characteristics mentioned above, but this description, written from the perspective of the Baron, should give a prospective reader an idea of the vibe:

the train had already pulled away into that great chaos of the intricate construction of railway switches, detours, and intersections, loop lines and wyes, switch plates, distance signals, waiting bays, and overhead lines — the platform on which those people could have followed the train was no more, and in particular they weren’t lucky, because they found him in the last, that is to say the first carriage, just as, in their moment of discovery, the train pulled away from the last few meters of the platform, so they couldn’t do much more than take some pictures of the train itself: there would be documentation that the train was here, he was on it, exactly as the Austrian news agency had stated in its report this morning, namely he was en route to his primary destination...

   It is also worth noting that at 512 pages, this is not a short book.  Baron Wenckheim is the third Krasznahorkai book I've tackled, and all three have kept to the same experimental style.

Void Star (2017) by Zachary Mason

 Book Review

Void Star (2017) 

by Zachary Mason

    Void Star is that rarest of finds, a "little library" pick-up.  Our neighborhood in Atwater Village has one really great little library that picks up a lot of books discarded by people who work in film, occasionally it will pick up five or six great books at the same time.  Void Star is the first book I've actually taken in four or five years.  I was intrigued by the idea that a major literary fiction focused publisher (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) had published this book in 2017.   Neuromancer by William Gibson was published in 1984, 33 years before 2017 making Void Star something of a cyberpunk revival book.  When it was published, it got a brief shout-out in a New York Times Book Review article about the new Dystopian Literature (Published March 2017), but was then forgotten in the 2018 review of Metamorphica, which misidentified Mason's last novel as 2010's The Lost Books of the Odyssey.  

    This information, coupled with the fact that I'd never heard of Void Star until I selected it from the Little Library made me even more intrigued.  Having completed the reading over several months of waiting in jail to visit clients, I can see why Farrar, Straus & Giroux published it in the first place, and also why it didn't make much of an impression with the reading public.  As many readers opined at the time, it is, at times, as difficult to understand as the densest modernist prose, despite a fairly conventional cyber-punk/dystopian lit scenario.   

  In 2025 I think the best pitch for some revival of interest is the integration of AI themes- a move forward from the one-note malevolence of 2001's Hal computer.  But if you are looking for some straight cyberpunk sci fi that is written as dense as the densest literary fiction Void Star is your jam.  Thanks North Atwater Little Library!

Revisiting: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (Audiobook)

 Revisited: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (Audiobook)

   I was editing and revising my post 19th Century Literature + 1900-1919- which is an individual post I think about all the time because it is the largest period of time contained in any post.   I saw this post- which was my first post about an Audiobook- a format which has proved important for this blog.

  I think Sherlock Holmes... is pretty played out, as a cultural icon- or at least worn out- I think it was the Will Ferrell movie that pushed it over the edge, sounded the death-nell, as it were.

Published 10/20/14
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892)
 by Arthur Conan Doyle
AUDIO BOOK AVAILABLE ON SPOTIFY

     This was the first audio book I've ever listened to, period.  I found it in Spotify, where you could play it as two five and half hour "songs."  I listened to it mostly when running, and otherwise while driving between San Diego and Los Angeles.  So it is an eleven hour time commitment, and it seems like it would be much faster to simply read the 12 short stories that comprise this volume.  The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes is the classic single volume compilation of Conan Doyle's short stories, though they do not represent all of them- there were contemporary stories that were not selected for the book and there were the "return" stories, like The Hound of the Baskervilles.

   I would say that Sherlock Holmes is maybe the first biggest literary character to emerge out of English Literature in the 19th century: Frankenstein and Dracula would be the top two. Like those other two, Sherlock Holmes has long since become unmoored from the source material.  It's important to emphasis which 12 stories actually constitute the book, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes:

"A Scandal in Bohemia"; Client: The King of Bohemia
"The Adventure of the Red-Headed League"; Client: Jabez Wilson
"A Case of Identity"; Client: Mary Sutherland
"The Boscombe Valley Mystery"; Client: Alice Turner
"The Five Orange Pips"; Client: John Openshaw
"The Man with the Twisted Lip"; Client: Mrs. St. Clair
"The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle"; No client.
"The Adventure of the Speckled Band"; Client: Miss Helen Stoner
"The Adventure of the Engineer's Thumb"; Client: Victor Hatherley
"The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor"; Client: Lord Robert St. Simon
"The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet"; Client: Alexander Holder
"The Adventure of the Copper Beeches"; Client: Violet Hunter

   There are other, unincluded short stories from the same time period, but they were not selected for this volume. Some themes do emerge: the theft of precious stones (The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle and the Beryl Coronet); noble clients (Noble Bachelor, A Scandal in Bohemia), and women in distress (Copper Beeches, Speckled Band, Twisted Lip, A Case of Identity.)  Although the enduring legacy has made Holmes a timeless figure, the original mysteries are interesting in terms of Holmes being simultaneously a "modern" figure, obsessed with the scientific method and the mysteries being quintessentially Victorian.  It is fair to observe that Holmes is a Victorian Hero, even though Conan Doyle was writing at the end or even beyond the end of that period, most of the mysteries are actually set several years in the past, with Watson being a veteran of the second Anglo Afghan war (ended 1870) and mentioning cases happening back in the 1880s. 

   Many of the edgier aspects Holmes character, his Cocaine usage, for example, are only mentioned in passing, his sex life not at all. 

    John Dowell is not the first "unreliable narrator"- the approach was not unknown during the sensation novels of the mid 19th century, but Dowell is the first unreliable narrator in the genre of the marriage novel.  He's not the first Author to use "impressionist"/stream of consciousness narrative technique, but the lack of knowledge and the way the knowledge (of her wife's affair with their bosom companion Edward Ashburnham) changes his perspective is the central technical concern of this book.

   Ashburnham is a bluff Englishman with a penchant for leisure and cheating on his wife, Lenora. Dowell revels in his ignorance, throughout the first hundred pages it is very much as if he doesn't want to reveal the truth: the affair, his wife committing suicide, the fact that Lenora knew about the affair.  He also learns that his wife had a prior affair, prior to their marriage, with a "low class" boy named Jimmy.

  Florence commits suicide after hearing Ashburnham, in the garden, with his young ward, Nancy- just released from a convent education.  The Nancy/Ashburnham's/John Dowell love rectangle also ends in blood and tears: Edward Ashburnham commits suicide, Nancy goes mad, and Dowell ends the story up caring for her.  Only Florence, who takes a dramatic turn towards villainess status in the third act, ends up happy-ish.

  It is an undeniably dark vision, pre-World War I in place and plot, but with a layer of dark, dark cynicism that guarantees it's relevance a hundred years later.

Gun Island (2019) by Amitav Ghosh

 Audiobook Review

Gun Island (2019)

by Amitav Ghosh

  I saw this book in a Guardian article about "cli fi" fiction- which I interpret basically as "speculative fiction written by non-genre authors with weather themes."  In that sense, Gun Island isn't cli fi exactly, although it does fit a broader definition of the same term, i.e. any contemporary literary fiction with a climate derived theme.  After I read the article, I saw the Audiobook was readily available from the Libby library Audiobook app.

  Gun Island is told from the perspective of Deen Datta, a rare book dealer resident (citizen?) of New York, with deep ties to his Indian/Bangladeshi past.   Familiar ground for Ghosh, though he has abandoned the historical fiction milieu of the Ibis trilogy for something that seems close to Autofiction in terms of the similarity between Datta and the author. Autofictional similarities besides, Gun Island is a novel about the impact of climate change on the lives of those both most and least affected- from the village altering shifts in the Bengali delta to the wealth, fire-prone enclaves of Los Angeles.