Out With the Old, In With the New

I've been quite busy the last few days, so there was no time for me to do an end-of-year roundup of all the books I've read, nor was there really time to let you know what I've got in store for the coming year. I'll try to do both now.

Last year I launched a project called Reading 2007, for which I reviewed (well, sort of reviewed) every single book I read during the calendar year. I started out with the notion of doing serious reviews, but to be perfectly frank I don't see this blog as that serious a thing, so they eventually became more like impressionist rambles inspired by the books. I only made it through fifty-three books during the year, well below my average, but adult life certainly takes its toll on both the energy and the free time. I did find, though, that the project made me more aware of how I was choosing my reading material, and how making that information public would affect (effect? I never get that right) how others saw me. I had a good time, and I learned some things, and reader response was generally positive. I also joined The Canadian Book Challenge (follow the link to see what that's all about), which will continue probably well into the new year.

For the coming year, I'm going to do much the same, except of course I'm calling my major project Reading 2008. Here are a few of the titles I've got lined up:

• Dead Man's Float, by Nicholas Maes (in progress)
• Spook Country, by William Gibson
• The Love of a Good Woman, by Alice Munro
• The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories, by Susanna Clarke
• Trouble is My Business, by Raymond Chandler
• The Gift, by Vladimir Nabokov
• Home Movies, by Ray Robertson

And of course there will be many more, both Canadian and not. There may even be some non-fiction in there, we'll have to see. I'd like to say that I'd also like to get back into making more posts about critical theory, but I've made such promises in the past, and they bore no fruit. Better to say that they may happen, or they may not. I will be making some changes to the infrastructure and such, though, and hopefully as soon as next week. I'd like to add a search function (there used to be one, but it sucked and kept breaking, so I took it down), and I'd like to add a way to page backwards through the archives in a more reasonable fashion than just selecting a category and getting every entry on a single page. I'm sure it can be done fairly easily, but I just haven't tried to wrap my head around it yet.

So best wishes for the new year to all of you, and thanks for reading.

Posted by August on 01.05.08 at 1:35 AM | Comments (0)

#53 - Where is the Voice Coming From?, by Rudy Wiebe

I read The Temptations of Big Bear several years ago as part of a course on contemporary Canadian literature. I was struck by Wiebe's formal experimentation and his deft, original approach at dealing with aspects of Canada's history that can be uncomfortable for many contemporary Canadians to acknowledge. It was a delicate, graceful book, and I'd squeeze the word "accomplished" in there somewhere if I could figure out how. So I was definitely looking forward to his 1974 follow-up book of short stories, Where is the Voice Coming From?. Turns out it was pretty terrible. Wiebe does not excel at the short story form at all. There are a few piece like "Scrapbook" and "Tudor King" that read like they were intended to be poignant coming of age tales about children dealing with the harsh realities of mortality in the prairies, but instead they are empty, amateurish scraps of narrative that confuse being sombre with being serious. "Millstone for the Sun's Day" looks like it could be a utopian/dysptopian science fiction thing, like Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery", but it just flat out doesn't make sense. Wiebe uses so many fictional titles and euphemism that the result is just kind of a vague sense of some kid doing something on a boat and some old man being displeased about it. "Did Jesus Ever Laugh?" falls into nearly every serial killer or insanity stereotype in all of literature (with the exception of the killer not being gay), and was boring to boot. In fact, of all thirteen of these stories, only and handful were worth reading at all, and only the title story actually stands out as memorable. And that's mostly just because it's a short version of the kind of thing he did in Big Bear.

Where is the Voice Coming From? was my third book for The Canadian Book Challenge, and my final book of 2007. I will begin my Reading 2008 project with Steve Zipp's novel, Yellowknife.

Posted by August on 12.30.07 at 1:29 PM | Comments (0)

#52 - Fat Woman, by Leon Rooke

I met Leon Rooke briefly in 2001 at the Eden Mills Writers' Festival, the same day I met Sheila Heti and George Elliott Clarke. I heard him read some stories, at least one of which hadn't been published yet. He didn't need a microphone; his voice wasn't just loud, it was big. You could hear it through the entire festival grounds. You could feel it. I told him that I had never read any of his books, but that after that performance I would go and buy the next one I found. And I did, in fact I bought two (Shakespeare's Dog, and Painting the Dog). Fat Woman is my third, and I didn't realize until I was nearly finished it that it was his first novel.

My edition isn't the one you see pictured here. Mine is a tacky blue mass-market paperback from a company called General Publishing, part of their New Press Canadian Classics line. On the cover is a not-very-good oil painting by a woman named Jane Martin. It's the sort of painting that would have been popular in Canada in the 1970s, but has not held up, and now looks only like the sort of thing that would have been popular in Canada in the 1970s.

I can't quite place the time in which the novel is supposed to be set, nor the location. The dialogue has an American south ring to it, but with the exception of some of the navy references, most of the cultural landmarks mentioned seem to be Canadian. The novel was first published in 1980, and though I've met people like those described in this novel, I still can't fathom that such deep, such profound ignorance could still exist at such a time in a nation such as this. And yet still I believe it. Fat Woman is a good book, not just because of Rooke's contagious prose style, hitting you like an old-school revivalist preacher, sucking you in and not ever letting go, but because there is a tremendous tension between an honest and sometimes harsh portrait of an uneducated rural woman and an overblown caricature of the same. There were times, reading this book, when my heart went out to Ella Mae Hopkins, for all that she had suffered growing up and at the hands of those around her who, despite their love (and here I'm thinking mostly of her dead mother and her husband) can't help but be cruel. Ella Mae suffers from wild mood swings, anxiety, and an over-eating disorder of epic proportions. It's easy to laugh at her, and sometimes I did. But I also pitied her, and despite her ignorance and her own portion of hate and bigotry, I felt myself sympathizing with her, and hoping that things would work out alright in the end. Rooke never really tells us for sure; it all comes down to whether or not we trust Edward Hopkins.

Fat Woman was my second contribution to The Canadian Book Challenge. Next: Where is the Voice Coming From?, by Rudy Wiebe. This will most likely be my last book of the year, depending on how much free time I find myself over the holiday season, so stay tuned for an end-of-year wrap-up and a preview of what books to expect in the new year. Happy holidays, everyone.

Posted by August on 12.22.07 at 3:46 AM | Comments (0)

#51 - The Republic of Love, by Carol Shields

My first experience with Canadian literature was with a Carol Shields novel. I was in the seventh or eighth grade, I can't exactly remember which, and I had just gotten into the habit of listening to talk radio on the CBC before going to bed (don't ask; I was a strange child), and the program that aired just as I was nodding off was one in which selections from a Canadian novel were read every night over the course of several days or weeks. That novel was The Stone Diaries. My parents bought me a copy on our next trip to "the city" (Winnipeg), and I was off. To this day it remains tied for the much coveted title of "Favourite Novel" (the other contender is A.S. Byatt's The Biographer's Tale). Despite becoming enamoured with her work at such an early age, The Republic of Love is only the third novel of hers that I have read. Why? Quite simply, because of Larry's Party. That book was a catastrophic failure, so far as I was concerned. Larry was not a man in any sense that I recognized, nor was he a woman in a man's body; I simply could not believe in the character at all, and it was a struggle to finish the book. I consoled myself with short story collections like Various Miracles and Dressing Up for the Carnival, but I was put off her novels for quite a few years. All this has now changed.

I fell in love with this book. The book's two protagonists, Fay McLeod and Tom Avery are damaged but real, well-drawn people with full lives, lives that feel like they could be biography rather than fiction. The main action of the book, and the main pleasure, is to watch these two characters move in a spiral around one another, sharing friends and places, existing on the periphery of each other's lives but never quite meeting, and never quite knowing why they fail to connect with the various lovers or almost-lovers that come and go. Destiny seems to have a hand in their eventual (inevitable) romance, but there is so much else going on, such a richness of detail to how their lives are presented, that it never rings false, never feels cheap or out-dated. The Republic of Love is an exquisite, satisfying book about real people finding real love, and living, more or less, happily ever after, and Shields somehow manages it without being sentimental or saccharine.

That's not to say that the book is perfect, of course. There are little things about it, not really relevant to the plot, where it's plain that Shields had no real experience. Things like fast food. Tom Avery eats on a pretty regular basis at his local A&W (a pretty appropriate choice, given the Winnipeg setting), but it's obvious that Shields hadn't set foot in one in more than a decade, if she ever had. The menu items he orders, which would have been popular when she was young had been discontinued for decades at the time the novel is set, she populates the restaurant with waitresses as well as cashiers and cooks, and the patrons tip regularly. None of this is accurate for any fast food franchise, never mind A&W specifically. It's a small mistake, but one that could have been avoided by eating a single meal for research, though I think I only found it jarring because I worked there for several years as a teenager. There were a few other similar things, mostly characters using slang terms and customs that belong to the generation before them, but they are of small consequence.

The Republic of Love was my first book as part of The Canadian Book Challenge. Next up: Fat Woman, by Leon Rooke.

Posted by August on 12.19.07 at 1:27 PM | Comments (0)

#50 - Invitation to a Beheading, by Vladimir Nabokov

I'm trying to remember if this is my fifteenth or sixteenth Navokov, but at any rate, it's the weakest, although that on its own doesn't say much. The weakest Nabokov is still stronger than the best work many other authors produce. Invitation to a Beheading was translated from the Russian (and quite ably, I must say) by Dmitri Nabokov, the author's son. It reads very much like Nabokov's later English-language novels.

Invitation to a Beheading follows Cincinnatus C. as he spends three weeks on death row at a dream-like prison in an equally dream-like country. His crime is "gnostical turpitude," a concept that is never fully explained, but based on the little information made available in the novel, has something to do with his being "opaque" at the level of his soul. What this actually means, I have no idea, but it frightens the other characters in the novel, who all live their lives based on a kind of dream logic that Cincinnatus can't seem to participate in with any success. It's actually that inability to mesh entirely with the dreamworld that saves him from his decided fate.

Much of the action of the novel, if you can really call it that (Nabokov's novels aren't really about "action" in the sense of events of consequence moving the plot forward), involves Cincinnatus, his jailer Rodion, fellow prisoner M'sieur Pierre (who also happens to be the executioner) and a few others whiling away the hours until the beheading, the exact date and time of which is kept hidden virtually until the moment itself. What Nabokov gives us is as much Alice in Wonderland as it is Kafka or Dostoyevsky, the dream-logic of the novel cheerfully thwarting any attempt at clarity or humanity, keeping Cincinnatus as off-balance as possible, he being the only conspicuously sane person in the novel.

I say this is Nabokov's weakest novel, or at least the weakest that I have read, because I think that he is at his best when his work is rooted firmly in the logic of things, and Invitation to a Beheading defies that, although the prose (even through Dmitri's translation) is brilliant, glittering stuff. This is a novel of strange juxtapositions and half-finished sentences, always skirting sense and clarity, but never quite hitting the mark. This is not a deficiency; it's obviously the whole point. I just don't think it's how Nabokov functions best. Either way, it was an incredibly satisfying read, as his books always are.

Next: The Republic of Love, by Carol Shields.

Posted by August on 12.16.07 at 10:51 PM | Comments (0)

#49 - On Her Majesty's Secret Service, by Ian Fleming

So two Bond novels in a row. I don't know if I'm spoiling myself, or setting myself up for a disappointment, because I'm now going to reach the end of my "guilty pleasure" series that much sooner. Ah well. Too late now, either way. I've been told by various folk that until the recent production of Casino Royale, this was the Bond novel that made it to film with the least radical changes, and that seems like it could still be a pretty fair assessment.

On Her Majesty's Secret Service was a slightly atypical Bond adventure, in the sense that he was genuinely undercover, right down to the fake name, and so there are a number of different challenges in this book; it's interesting to note that Bond may shy away from false identities simply because it is too difficult to play out convincingly, even with major preparation. The other atypical aspect of the book was of course the fact that Bond finally gets married (to a young woman named Tracy, daughter of the Capu of the Union Corse). Though much of the first third of the book is dedicated to Bond meeting and developing feelings for Tracy, the marriage still seems forced and rather rushed. I was not entirely convinced by it, and it's no surprise that she was killed in the last pages.

Alright, no more Bond for a while. Next up: Invitation to a Beheading, by Vladimir Nabokov.

Posted by August on 12.10.07 at 2:15 PM | Comments (0)

#48 - The Spy Who Loved Me, by Ian Fleming

What has kept the Bond franchise from falling apart entirely, in terms of the films, are two things. First, the casting of Daniel Craig, who comes across as dangerous and slightly brutal, in addition to charismatic. Second, it is a return to the source material, and not just the content, but the spirit as well. Fleming's novels are simple, tough, and entertaining. What kept them fresh (what still keeps them fresh, for me at least) is the inclusion of new perspectives on the Bond character. Some previous books spent some time dealing with how Bond behaves at home, what it's like when he spends extended periods at the office, and how he prepares for and deals with a life of danger, rather than just, like the films, showing fast-paced glimpses of the danger itself. Such things keep him human. The Spy Who Loved Me offers yet another perspective, that of the "Bond girl". Viv Michel is a young Canadian woman who has returned to North America after spending a few years in Europe where she was used horribly by men she trusted. She is on a sort of pilgrimage, to find herself and to restore her confidence. She takes a short-term job to make a little money before heading further south, and accidentally stumbles into the middle of an insurance fraud scheme being perpetrated by some local gangsters. Bond doesn't even appear until the last third of the novel, and only then because he's had a flat tire nearby. The adventure is brief and strange, and has absolutely nothing to do with the nuclear submarine plot of the 1977 film of the same name.

The only real problem that I can see is that Fleming didn't seem to know a damn thing about how to write women (he may not have known a damned thing about women). The book is written from Viv's perspective, in her own voice, but she is basically just a collection early and mid-Twentieth Century stereotypes, and I think she would be sure to offend any modern female reader (and possibly any female reader at the time; certainly any who read the work of people like Iris Murdoch).

Next: On Her Majesty's Secret Service, by Ian Fleming (because there wasn't enough Bond in the previous Bond adventure to satisfy me).

Posted by August on 12.07.07 at 1:27 PM | Comments (0)

#47 - The Cheese Monkeys, by Chip Kidd

It's strange, starting to read a novel by someone made famous for their visual skills. You hope, frankly, that they aren't downright illiterate, being published simply because they have a name rather than because they have any talent with words. Thank God that Chip Kidd can write.

Okay, so he makes some rookie mistakes. The pacing The Cheese Monkeys is way too fast, and the ending is a bit of a cop-out (I'm given to understand that this is partly based on his own experiences, but still, give us some closure). The only reason the book clocks in at 274 pages is because Kidd has given the text some insanely large margins (I must admit, the book is pretty cool to look at, fits comfortably in the hand, etc.; if nothing else, Kidd is an amazing designer). I would imagine that in word count it's barely more than a novella. But it's funny. Let's make that clear. The damned book is hilarious. I laughed out loud more times than I can count. The characters never quite become simple caricatures (at least the main ones don't), but it's a close call, because we also never really have enough time to get to know them properly, and in some ways the second half of the book seems like an excuse to get Kidd's ideas about graphic design down on paper. Not that they are bad ideas; they just aren't meaty enough to support an entire novel (the humour is, though; it's great).

I hope Kidd tries another novel, but something longer. I'd certainly read it.

And now: The Spy Who Loved Me, by Ian Fleming.

Posted by August on 12.05.07 at 11:59 AM | Comments (0)

#46 - Jitterbug Perfume, by Tom Robbins

This was a fun little book, and though it's actually wildly different, in many ways I was reminded of Christopher Moore's Lamb, my first book of the year. Robbins leans less towards the reverence than Moore, but also doesn't go quite as readily for the cheap laugh, either.

What we have in Jitterbug Perfume is an unfinished quest, three or four rather strange romances (all, in some way resolved with a certain level of satisfaction) and an unusual mediation on the relation between biochemistry and longevity. Oh yes, and beets. I feel better about eating beets, having read this. I can't really tell you that I was expecting this novel to be quite so grand (although it felt quite small), but after having seen the film adaptation of Robbins' Even Cowgirls Get The Blues it would have been wrong of me to go in with any real expectations at all. They would have been thoroughly confounded.

As is often the case for me with film and literature from the 1980s, I really only liked one or two characters (I don't know why it is, but I find that the 1980s had an incredible knack for justifying extreme selfishness, and believing that such a thing was somehow likable). Of course those two characters were Alobar, the more or less immortal man, and Priscilla the genius waitress, who showed more patience than I would have (or than a saint most likely would have) at the sexual-assault-level advances of her lesbian best friend.

There was a lot going on in this book, and I'd hate to spoil it for you, so I'll just say that I'm going to read some of his other books, probably next year, just to see if they live up to this one. Oh yes, also: eat your beets.

Next: The Cheese Monkeys, by Chip Kidd.

Posted by August on 12.02.07 at 1:19 PM | Comments (0)

#45 - The Man in the High Castle, by Philip K. Dick

As I said earlier this year, every Philip K. Dick novel is like your first Philip K. Dick novel. And this one was no exception. The premise of the novel, "what would the world look like had Japan and the Nazis won WW2?" is a strange one to imagine from my vantage point this far from the war (my father, though older than average for fathers of twenty-eight year olds, is still not old enough to remember the war). The Allied victory seems inevitable, and we forget that there were times when it was very much in doubt. So how does it play out?

The Japanese of Dick's fictional late 1960s turn out to be very much like the Japanese of today (or rather, like our Western view of the Japanese people), and offer a reasonable, although not entirely likable to my eyes, way of living and dealing with the world. I found myself sympathizing with many of the conquering/colonizing Japanese characters far more than with most of the ignorant, bigoted American characters. At first I thought that Dick had painted a portrait of an America turned bitter and racist in defeat, and heavily influenced by many of the worst characteristics of the conquering fascists, but then I realized that if I were to look at the popular media from the time that Dick was actually pointing out that, even in victory he could see a great flaw in the popular American consciousness. Heavy stuff. I would not be surprised to learn that this book influenced William Gibson, actually. It felt very close to some of his work.

There's too much to say about this book, really. It's one of the best and most thought-provoking books I've read all year, and I was genuinely saddened that it ended. The title of the book refers to an author within the novel who has written an "alternate history" of the Second World War, one in which the Allies won (and two his credit, Dick changes some of the details so that it remains genuine fiction). The book has an interesting place in the novel, something that I think might deserve serious critical attention (if it hasn't already, I haven't looked), and I don't feel like I've thought about it long enough to give any real report on that place. My head nearly exploded when the source of book, or the author's ideas for the book, were revealed.

I can only finish by saying, read this book.

Next: Jitterbug Perfume, by Tom Robbins.

Posted by August on 11.30.07 at 2:36 PM | Comments (0)

#44 - Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, by J.K. Rowling

First of all: never you mind, these books are fun. Lighten up. That being said, fun is about all the Potter books are. They aren't great literature, or moral instruction, or a system around which to build one's life. For an adult like myself, they are cotton-candy, something to read and enjoy in a day or so (I do have a job), and then to let dissolve into nothingness. A confection. Having said that, this was the most action-packed of the seven books, but also the one least concerned with building the world, which was my favourite part of reading them. Several people died who I was not expecting to die, and several people survived who I was not expecting to survive. The revelations about Dumbledore and his subsequent appearances (yes, he's dead) were handled quite well, but the whole Jesus Potter thing was not. Beyond that, I have nothing to say, except it was a fun little read, and definitely a nice break after that monstrosity, Underworld.

Next: The Man in the High Castle, by Philip K. Dick.

Posted by August on 11.30.07 at 2:27 PM | Comments (0)

#43 - Underworld, by Don DeLillo

Opinions, or so the bookish corner of the web tells me, are divided on whether or not Underworld is DeLillo's masterpiece, or an appalling waste of time. English critic James Wood seems to be leading the charge against DeLillo. I can't actually link to (ore even read) his article in The New Republic because it doesn't seem to be online, but I can link to this article from The Boston Globe by Christopher Shea, about Wood and his current role in American letters, and I can certainly link to Garth Risk Hallberg's rebuttal. From what I can gather, the gist of Wood's argument against DeLillo, and Underworld specifically, is an excessive concern with paranoia, which Wood sees as incompatible with great literature. Wood also (apparently; I'm working with second-hand interpretive readings here) doesn't believe there to be any real human beings in the novel, only... well, I don't know what. Not archetypes or cardboard cutouts, but certainly not genuine people. Hallberg's claim is that Wood simply doesn't understand what's going on, and is letting his own preoccupations ruin his reading of the novel. (I was going to do a big long thing tracing his arguments against Wood, but this books frankly isn't worth all the trouble, so I'm just going to say that you should read the two articles I just linked to, and then come back here and remember that my statements are informed by them.)

I'm going to have to agree with Wood here, on some pretty important points. First of all, this novel is incredibly overrated. The backward-looking structure doesn't seem to help, as it very much appears that DeLillo didn't quite think it through. While, like life, the focus of people's lives changes from time period to time period, DeLillo skips the transitions, so instead of experiencing the sense of Nick Shay trying to understand himself, we get a half-assed, barely there character who is wildly inconsistent in his behaviour and his mental state with very little explanation as to why. I'm left adrift wondering whether Nick is a single character traced through time, or an amalgam of impressions that the author simply stuck a label on for the sake of convention. I suppose if DeLillo had been more explicit, and hadn't made many of his characters so similar (in the murky past), this would have been easier to work through. There were times when I would read a section, twenty pages or so, and not know which characters were involved, because no names would be mentioned and the style, setting, and actions could have referred to five or six different people, given what was already known. This was a hugely frustrating experience. The first hundred or so pages were solid, well-written, entertaining, and though I didn't always know what was going on or why, I felt like there was a purpose behind it. The last hundred or so pages were much the same. It was the six hundred and fifty pages in the middle that ruined it for me.

I actually don't blame Wood for focusing so much on the paranoia. With so much vague nonsense, half-formed characters (Hoover and Sinatra were better drawn and made for more interesting reading than either Nick Shay or Klara Sax, as was sister Edgar and any number of the peripheral characters) and directionless meandering through the ethics and philosphy of trash, the paranoia is the one consistent, oppressive force in the novel. It connects the characters far more than proximity, the passage of time, or that damned baseball, which somehow seems to always come just shy of being a meaningful symbol. Paranoia is something to hold on to, to make one feel like the two months spent reading this book weren't entirely wasted.

I need to say some things about Klara Sax. She is supposed to be an artist. Articles about the book, characters in the book, even the back of the book itself, have all made much of the fact that she is an artist. Except that she isn't. It doesn't help that DeLillo can't write worth a damn about art (baseball, yes, but art? A.S. Byatt he ain't), coming across like a half-literate tourist trying to explain the poster selection in the gift shop at the Louvre, but Klara Sax is just flat out not an artist. People around her make art, and in one memorable seen she is being interviewed about her art, while others around her that she pays are actually going about the business of making it. But we never really see her making art, or doing much thinking about it at all. At least, not thinking about her own work. She is not dedicated, has no drive or obsession or commitment. I felt more like DeLillo wanted to feature an unmarried woman of a certain class, but didn't want to have to bother about giving her a job.

I suppose that's all. I started writing this, several weeks ago actually, with many, many things to say, but no real organizing principle to my thoughts. Having written, re-written, thrown away, and re-thought it all over the last several weeks, my thoughts have become less coherent and my desire to rant and rave about having wasted so much of my time on this colossal mess of a novel has become almost too strong to resist. So I'm just going to stop.

Next: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, by J.K. Rowling.

Posted by August on 11.30.07 at 2:22 PM | Comments (0)

#42 - Childhood, by André Alexis

In point of fact, I finished reading Childhood (or Childhood, according to the typography on the cover) on Saturday evening, but I was out of town, and I haven't had the time to sit down at a computer properly since returning home. Some of you may recall my enthusiastic comments about Despair. It was hard to imagine, after reading such a collection of stories, where Alexis would go with a novel. He went with the fairly typical first-novel bildungsroman, but his execution was far from typical. The book, as the clever typographer noted, deals almost exclusively with the pre-teen years of one Thomas MacMillan (that's two Thomases in a row), a young man raised in unique circumstances and raised by a succession of people who are, every one of them, both ordinary folks and raving loons. Thomas tells the story not only in plain, straightforward prose, but also through lists and timetables and diagrams. Thomas has obviously grown to be a most unusual adult, with a life that is almost certainly worthy of its own novel (I would read it), but all that's offered are glimpses.

In Childhood, Alexis presents us with circumstances and characters that are at a level of detachment I find difficult to describe, but that also have an emotional impact, a deeply touching quality, that makes any summary seem not only incomplete, but also somehow unclean, or insulting. Just read the book. You won't regret it.

Next: Don DeLillo's Underworld, for which I may actually do some additional research, because of all the fuss that's been buzzing about the blogosphere (guh) lately.

Posted by August on 09.26.07 at 2:47 AM | Comments (0)

#41 - Shelf Monkey, by Cory Redekop

I bought this book for two reason. First, there is the cover. It's gorgeous! The cover is simple, clean, very dynamic, and in person extremely attractive. Unusually attractive, in fact (it turns out that the cover flaps are too large to be practical, though, and they make the book unwieldy to hold at times; the extra-tight binding and narrow gutter don't help either, but it still looks pretty). Second, there is a blurb on the back of the book from Canadian author Eric McCormack (no, not the actor) in which he indicates that he appears as a character in the novel. Eric was a professor of mine during my undergraduate years, and though I wouldn't go so far as to say that we are friends, we do know each other more than just to say hello in the hallway. And it's always cool to see people you know showing up in fiction.

I enjoyed this book despite myself. Page one was a reasonably convincing fake newspaper article, but page two almost lost me, with the immediate launch into what I can't help but think of as the Canadian Indie Style. Some of you may not be familiar with it (although if you've read Flyboy Action Figure Comes With Gasmask, or really anything else by Jim Munroe, you've definitely encountered it), so I'll give you a brief rundown of what's involved. It's self-consciously casual to the point of seeming forced. The authors tend to have large vocabularies, but rarely use them effectively. Technique is virtually irrelevant, with plot and overt character development being nearly the only concerns. The narrators are self-deprecating, misunderstood, inwardly aggressive but outwardly meek. The women who serve as love interests for these characters are uniformly aggressive, beautiful, artistic, sporting an unusual name, and often (though not always) bisexual. Quirky isn't the word. In many cases, though the books are entertaining and original, that's all they are, and it's easy to see why the authors stayed "indie". I like independent presses, and they fill a need that, frankly, I wouldn't trust the larger house to fill. But. The Canadian Indie Style is genuinely grating after ten pages or so, and a book has to have a lot going for it otherwise to not outright piss me off before the end. Most books in this vein seem to feel like they've gotten almost there, but haven't quite made it. Shelf Monkey is written in almost quintessential Canadian Indie Style, but thankfully has a lot of things going for it, and I was able to put my hatred of The Style aside and just enjoy the story.

The novel is presented a series of documents (mostly emails written by protagonist Thomas Friesen, although there are newspaper articles and transcripts included) as he tries to explain, to Eric McCormack of all people, why he is on the run from the law. It's a clever technique, and it works for the most part. It does fall apart a bit when you realize that nearly ever one of the documents, no matter who the ostensible author, is written in more or less the same tone. Thomas is a failed lawyer, and bibliophile much like myself (although we have very different tastes), and he finds work in a big box book store in Winnipeg. There he meets and eventually befriends Warren, Aubrey and (the aggressive, beautiful, unusually named) Danae. Despite being hopped up on pain pills left over from what seems to be a failed suicide attempt, he is extremely lucid, with the exception of an early scene in which he encounters an over-sized mock-up of Munroe Purvis, a talkshow host with a book club more popular than Oprah's. Purvis publishes all his recommended books himself, and they are apparently the worst book ever published, with no real editorial integrity behind publishing them. The masses buy what they are told to buy.

I think what saves Shelf Monkey from being just another CIS book is how intense the satire actually is. The title comes from the group that Aubrey, Warren and Danae form, eventually including Friesen and others, to work out their frustrations about selling bad books to uneducated and uncaring readers day in and day out. They are joined by librarians and other sort of professional bibliophiles once a week on the edge of Winnipeg, where they gather in a vacant subdivision and burn books they hate. All the participants have secret names (Don Quixote, Yossarian, Offred, even a Gandalf), and present their candidates for burning in a ritualized way. As you can imagine, it devolves into cult territory pretty quickly. The problem here, and it's the only problem really, is that the setup is so long, and relatively speaking the book is so short, that Aubrey, Warren and Danae begin frothing at the mouth before we get a chance to really understand their characters, and without any real warning signs. If satire wasn't moving the plot forward so forcefully, the leap from burning books to blow off steam and a calculated act of violence (you'll have to read the book to find out what) would simply be too great to bear.

Shelf Monkey, ultimately, is a fun book with some problems that are (hopefully) only indicative of the fact that it's Redekop's first time at bat. If he gives it another go I'll most likely pick that one up as well, and good luck to him in the future. Oh yeah, and like all of us, he's got a blog.

Next: Childhood, by André Alexis.

Posted by August on 09.21.07 at 12:01 PM | Comments (1)

#40 - The Big Sleep, by Raymond Chandler

I think this might be my first ever crime/mystery book. Ever. I've wanted to read Raymond Chandler's books for many years now, since I first read an interview with another author (sadly, I can't remember who, or in what publication) describing Chandler's skill at describing, of all things, furniture. Later, I saw the excellent series of books put out by Vintage (my cover is not the same as the one shown, which I like better) and wanted to own them for their beauty as objects, as well as for the stories themselves. Finally, a few weeks ago, I managed to find a copy of The Big Sleep that I could afford (it wouldn't do to read them out of order, after all). It was great fun to read.

Chandler's prose is energetic, casual, and surprisingly fun. I was worried that I would have to remind myself at times that Philip Marlowe is the source of the hard-nosed detective cliché, and not just another in a long, unimpressive string. Not once did such a thought actually cross my mind. The slang was sometimes hard to follow, but Marlowe was almost refreshing, defying the stereotype in a surprising number of ways. He had a tremendous and overflowing sense of humour, for one thing. I was surprised by the treatment of sexuality and pornography in the book. I expected more repression, the references to be less direct. Instead Chandler was frank, open, and though not exactly non-judgemental, his characters seemed almost less conservative than many an average person would be today. I can't wait to read more.

Next: Shelf Monkey, by Cory Redekop

Posted by August on 09.21.07 at 2:38 AM | Comments (0)

#39 - Who Do You Think You Are?, by Alice Munro

I'm almost embarrassed to say that this is my first Munro book. I had assumed, as perhaps many Canadian literary students would have, that I had encountered her work in high school, or in a compilation in an early survey course at university. I now find it unlikely. I can't imagine any circumstances that might lead to forgetting that I had encountered such a strong voice. I've encountered stories of this kind before, of course. You can't throw a rock in the Canadian literary world without striking a dozen authors who write stories in this vein. I have actually said on more than one occasion, and even in public forums, that such stories are exactly what it wrong with contemporary Canadian writing. Alice Munro is certainly not what is wrong with contemporary Canadian writing. She is very much what is right. Reading Who Do You Think You Are? (and I admit to choosing this book to start with because of the pretty girl on the cover) I got, not the sense of a stale form or shopworn conventions, but rather the sense of a skilled hand shaping the stories into the only form they could have taken. N+1 has claimed her as an American author (a common mistake, given the frequency that her work appeared in American publications, but hardly surprising, given the penchant of the American press to claim anyone who does interesting work as an American—I have even seen Zadie Smith claimed as an American author, since On Beauty featured American characters quite heavily), but she is very obviously Canadian and in many ways the inventor of the contemporary short story for us. Who Do You Think You Are? is a book of jewels, some in their raw beauty, and some cut into delicate shapes, and each one worth a king's ransom.

Next: The Big Sleep, by Raymond Chandler.

Posted by August on 09.21.07 at 1:59 AM | Comments (0)

The Story So Far...

It's eight and a half months into my Reading 2007 project, so I think that a status report is long overdue. The idea, for those of you who haven't been following the blog over the last year, is that I write a mini-review of every book I read this year. I've managed to keep that up for all thirty-eight books that I've read so far, sort of. Most of the "mini-reviews" have wound up being rather disorganized and somewhat disconnected from any particular critical stance. And they also tend to be written within a half hour of my having finished reading the book, and rarely do they take more than a half hour to write. It was never my intention to be so slapdash (I swear I'm capable of more considered judgements), but I think I actually prefer it this way. I never intended this site to be a place for my deepest or most profound thoughts, and I certainly don't want it to turn into a forum for academic writing. For one thing, I'm notoriously slow when it comes to formal writing, and for another I'd rather that sort of work show up in other venues, preferably venues in which I'm being paid. I'd prefer this blog be more casual, and it has been. So for now on I think I'll scrap the notion of "mini-reviews". My posts about specific books will not change any, I think it would just be better to think of them as impressions or gut reactions.

I'm also quite behind on my reading. I used to read between seventy and ninety books a year, and right now I'm not even on track to hit sixty. I suppose this isn't a bad thing per se, but I certainly feel like I'm cheating myself somehow. It feels like the longer I'm out of touch with critical/academic world, the harder it is for me to focus for long periods of time on a given text, the more things like excitement and adventure matter, often at the expense of intellectual pleasure. They are not mutually exclusive pleasures, of course, but they are quite different kinds of pleasure. I'll leave it to the individual reader to determine which is the greater, if they believe such an assessment can be made honestly.

Also, and I'm going to give this subject its own paragraph because it bothers me so much, I find that I'm very conscious about what authors I'm reading. Far more so than before I made my reading choices so self-consciously public. Am I reading enough women authors? Enough authors of colour? Enough Canadians? I've never seriously considered these issues before, in fact I dismissed them as completely irrelevant. The colour of an author's skin, their birthplace, or whatever interesting bits they may have between their legs always struck me as completely irrelevant to whether or not I would read their books. But the blogosphere (I can't tell you the self-loathing that accompanied my typing that word) seems to think such things are important. Many of the blogs I read (Bookslut, Bookninja, Edward Champion's The Return of the Reluctant, The Elegant Variation) seem to think these are issues of paramount of importance. They look at the bylines in magazines and breakdown gender and ethnic percentages. They look at the juries and winners of major prizes, pay attention to who gets more column inches. (Never mind that they don't look at any considerations beyond the blunt notion of prejudice for any numerical inequality.) I honestly don't give a shit, so long as I get to read good books. But. I feel like, if I read more books by men than women, more books by caucasians than by people of colour, more books by Brits and Americans than by Canadians, I may somehow be judged by readers of this blog to be a misogynist, a racist, or in some way a traitor to my culture. I could point out that my two favourite novels are both written by women, and that one of them is Canadian. I could point out that of my four favourite living Canadian writers, two are black, and one is a Jewish woman. The problem is that making these statements would genuinely make me feel like I was trying to hide something, or that somehow reading more books by men than women in 2007 is a misogynist act. It isn't, and I don't have to defend my reading choices. I think, ultimately, that choosing my reading material based on considerations other than "do I think I will enjoy this book?" to be demeaning to myself and to the authors I read. If I pick up a book by Zadie Smith because she is a woman of colour rather than because I think I will enjoy her book, I feel like I am implying that her skin colour and fiddly bits are more important than her skill with words (I chose Smith as an example because she has been written about as a significant female author and as a significant author of colour, but I read On Beauty last year, and loved it, because it sounded like a damned fine book, and for no other reason). That is an implication I am unwilling to make. I know that if someone picked my work because I have white skin and a penis, and not because they think my work will be enjoyable, I would be insulted. Now, my experiences as a white male in our society may influence my subject matter or even what sort of writing styles I may experiment with (I may be less likely to indulge in certain kinds of gender ambiguities, or certain kinds of rhythm), but those things have no bearing on whether or not my work is any good. At any rate, I don't like thinking of these issues when I choose my reading material, and it pisses me off that I am feeling this kind of peer pressure, even if it is indirect.

No matter what happens, I think that when 2007 is over, I'm going to start again with a similar project for 2008. Lastly, I'll just give you a taste of some of the books I have on deck.

• Underworld, by Don DeLillo (I've been reading a lot of stuff being written about this book, and I want to chime in, but not until I read the damned thing.)
• The Recognitions, by William Gaddis
• White Teeth, by Zadie Smith
• V., by Thomas Pynchon
• The Republic of Love, by Carol Shields
• The Big Sleep, by Raymond Chandler
• Childhood, by André Alexis

Thanks for reading!

Posted by August on 09.15.07 at 1:30 AM | Comments (0)

#38 - The Bell, by Iris Murdoch

A professor of mine once told me that I should read Iris Murdoch, because she "basically invented A.S. Byatt" (it may be difficult to tell from reading this blog, but Byatt is one of my favourite authors). And having now read The Bell, I can see the truth in this statement. Murdoch's style has a lot in common with Byatt's, although it's difficult to pinpoint specific examples. One gets the same sense of a complex intellectual involvement with the inner lives of a number of characters, expressed through simple and thoroughly proper English prose. The Plain Style, I guess. Robertson Davies with a better ear. It's lovely and hypnotic to read, even when nothing in particular is happening, although unlike Byatt, it's very rare for more than a page or two to go by without something of significance happening to someone. Events in this novel are like stones thrown in a calm pool of water; each makes very little impact on its own, but the ripples linger and expand. Murdoch throws enough tiny stones that eventually the pool becomes like white water rapids from the mingling of all those ripples.

The novel both opens and closes with an omniscient narrator looking at a collection of characters as if from a great distance, the tone alternating between detachment and a kind of good-natured condescension. The characters are neurotic, dysfunctional, only sometimes likable, and yet profoundly, recognizably human. In some ways this seems a little too pat, an easy and uncomplicated way of setting up the board and then taking it down again, like a game of checkers, or maybe Scrabble. The bulk of the novel is of course more specific, dealing with the daily events and remarkably troubled spiritual lives of a group of people living in a lay religious community called Imber Court, attached almost like a parasite to an abbey of cloistered Anglican Benedictine nuns. The Bell for a time seems like it will follow the spiritual rebirth and emotional development of Mrs. Dora Greenfield, a skittish, not particularly intelligent woman who has married an appalling man named Paul, though she is in her own way quite appalling (James Tayper-Pierce, one of the Imber residents, says she is the sort of woman "who is sometimes called a bitch"), as she is selfish, thoughtless and almost without the power of introspection. At the opening of the novel she is returning to her husband Paul (violent, cruel, and even more selfish than she) after having walked out on their marriage for a time. Paul is a scholar, working on old documents that have been acquired by the abbey. Imber and many of the other characters are introduced by the narrator as though through her eyes. She does eventually begin to develop into a functional, independent, adult human being, but she is really only on the cusp of that achievement when the novel switches, at the end, back to the distant eye-in-the-sky style of narration.

By far the most interesting character in the book is Michael, the de facto leader of Imber court, owner of the grounds, one-time aspirant to the clergy and closeted (well, obviously closeted, the book was first published in 1958) homosexual. The most interesting parts of the book happen when Michael tries to reconcile his deep spirituality with his sexuality, two things which he sees as wholly incompatible, yet stemming from the same source. Interestingly, he thinks of his sexuality wholly in terms of love, never in terms of lust, although when the narrator recounts the events of his life, it's clear that lust was also present. Dora, the less emotionally developed person, is perfectly capably of acknowledging and acting through lust, but Michael, the spiritual man who is endlessly examining his own actions and intentions, will only acknowledge love as a motivating factor where his sexuality is concerned. In some ways this is the most alien part of the book. We live, today, in a society that (well, for the most part; there's still progress to be made) accepts homosexuals as people who are simply different from heterosexuals, neither better nor worse. The vast majority of society (or, at least it seems that way from my experience) has moved past the ideas that gay people are criminal, or in some way suffering from an illness, but to Michael and Toby (the young man with whom Michael falls, conditionally, in love with at Imber), these are real and vital concerns to deal with. One of Michael's major struggles is to be at peace with his sexual identity, not only because he is different and the world unkind to those who are different, as the case would be today, but also because he must struggle with the idea, placed in him by both his society and his religion, that what he is must somehow also be wrong, dangerous, or evil, even. Michael's turmoil is at turns fascinating and heartbreaking. Even when he reaches a place of equilibrium he must constantly be on guard of threats to it from the outside, as he is not free to be who his is.

There are other characters, such as Nick and Catherine, ghosts from Michael's past, who are necessarily present but never seem wholly there, and are much less significant than the narrator suggests they could be (this is perhaps a major difference between Byatt and Murdoch; Murdoch has them play their role but otherwise ignores them, while Byatt would have given them greater attention). Likewise the bells themselves, the pieces of history that seem to bind everyone together at Imber, and direct much of the action of the book. They are excuses to set the pieces in motion, and though deeper tales are hinted at, they are not explored. Byatt would certainly have explored them. This is not a deficiency in Murdoch, merely a difference. The Bell is a tight novel, and indeed "wise, witty and compulsive" as the blurb on the cover suggests. (Oh yes, mine is an older copy than the one pictured here, so the cover is different.)

Next, Who Do You Think You Are?, a book of linked short stories by Alice Munroe.

Posted by August on 09.12.07 at 12:32 PM | Comments (0)

#37 - Iron Council, by China Miéville

The greatest strength of China Miéville's New Crobuzon novels is the freshness, the outright alien-ness of the world and the peoples that populate it, and that continues to shine through in Iron Council. The problem with the book seems to be a lack of control. The idea of much-abused railway workers taking over a job site and stealing the train to form a kind of socialist utopia is a little far-fetched, but in a world where people have beetles instead of heads, it's certainly workable. The problem is the execution. The idea that an awkward collection of working class folk, criminals, and prostitutes would be able to organize themselves, successfully fight a well-trained military, and then escape, all while having to continually tear up the track behind them and lay it anew ahead of them is preposterous, even in Bas-Lag. I understand that Miéville has socialist leanings (so do I, to a lesser degree), but there are limits to the credulity of even the most sympathetic reader. The interlude describing the history of the Iron Council started out showing tremendous potential; the scenes with Judah Low learning golemetry from the stiltspear people were delicate and compelling, but it quickly fell apart when the socialist politics (which Miéville claims leak in subconsciously) began to take over and the plot and characters took a backseat. It's especially disappointing given how good The Scar was.

The war between Tesh and New Crobuzon and the working class uprising within the city were far more interesting than the story of the train, and it was in that subplot (and was a subplot, even though the blurb on the back of the book and the early chapters of the novel suggest that they are the main plot elements) that Miéville's most polished writing can be seen. There's so much going on there that it's difficult to talk about without having to rehash half the book, but that the war itself was treated more as a problem that could be (and was) solved in five pages of special effects and a chase scene was more than a little disappointing, particularly in light of how emotionally complex the issues leading up to those five page were.

Miéville's prose felt considerably less competent in this novel as well. He's not a bad writer, not at all. He has a talent for finding interesting images and imbuing them with an emotional significance that seems inherent rather than contextual. But Iron Council simply felt sloppy. Events that would later be referenced with specificity were described with a dream-like vagueness that often made it difficult to figure out just what the hell was going on. It felt like he was in such a hurry to move the plot forward that he ignored the mechanics of his prose. In addition, he once again made use of the pseudo-stream-of-consciousness interludes that are a kind of trademark of his novels. They are always, always, always the worst parts of his work, and they are a chore to read through, because he's frankly not very good at the technique. I do hope he drops it for the next book. So in the final analysis, Iron Council wasn't terrible, by any means, but the book could definitely have done with another draft.

Back to the world of literary fiction with Iris Murdoch's The Bell.

Posted by August on 08.26.07 at 2:21 PM | Comments (0)

#36 - The Scar, by China Miéville

In The Scar, Miéville returns for a second time to New Crobuzon (or more accurately, Bas-Lag and the floating pirate city called Armada) in a novel that is far more refined and entertaining than Perdido Street Station, although I enjoyed that novel very much. The narrative spends most of its time with Bellis Coldwine, a peripheral character from the first book (I don't recall if she actually appears, although her name is familiar, so I presume she was at least mentioned) and Tanner Sack, a Remade criminal (although he is possibly the most honest character in the book, and his crime is never once mentioned). I think it's fair to say that these two characters are high among the reasons that I enjoyed The Scar more than Perdido Street Station. They are both flawed, with complex inner lives that can shift from cold selfishness and blind wrath to pity to sadness or ambivalence in real human ways, but at the core they are more-or-less honest people doing the best they can, and for that they are likable. Isaac, Yagharek, Lin, and the others in Perdido Street Station were interesting, but generally they were opportunist jerks, and it took me a long time to give a damn about any of them.

I think another reason I enjoyed this book so much (and read it so quickly) was the nautical setting. Folks who know me will know that I am a great fan of the late Patrick O'Brian's work, and anything well-written about adventure on the high seas is almost guaranteed to strike my fancy. Miéville is obviously not a sailor, and there were many times where I'm sure he was pushing the physics of his fictional world past the breaking point, but still he handled the naval bits with tremendous and convincing gusto, if not necessarily with skill.

I know that's not a lot to say about a novel this large and complicated, but it's late, I'm tired, and you should really just go out and see for yourself. I'll try to do better with the next one. And since I still crave excitement, adventure, and really wild things, I'm going to read the last China Miéville book in my possession (and the only of his adult works I have yet to read), Iron Council

Posted by August on 08.16.07 at 1:31 AM | Comments (0)

#35 - Thunderball, by Ian Fleming

I've mostly (but not always) been treating these Bond novels in a couple of ways. First, I've been dealing with them as guilty pleasures, books that I read with a Ulysses dust jacket over the cover (I don't actually do that; in fact I really love the lurid painted covers). Second, I've been using them to wind down between more serious books, books that are more emotionally intense or intellectually demanding (or just plain boring). Thunderball reminded me that Fleming's prose is actually quite good. It's extremely compact and straightforward, but that isn't a limitation. Fleming still manages to convey a sense of physicality and decadence without ever letting go of its plain serviceability.

The racism and bigotry that marred some of the other books is mostly absent from this book (mostly because the Nassau locals aren't really given any substantial parts in the book), and Domino Vitali is pretty close to being a real human being. This novel also marks the first appearance of SPECTRE, the group of freelance terrorists that serves as Bond's major opposition in the films. Much of what made it into the films (the use of numbers instead of names, the extent of their plots, and so on) makes much more sense here, and actually seems practical rather than ludicrous. I was very nearly tempted to immediately move on to The Spy Who Loved Me, but I've got a lot more demanding books to read, and only so many Bond novels left. Rationing is important.

Up next: The Scar, by China Miéville.

Posted by August on 08.14.07 at 1:27 AM | Comments (0)

#34 - Orlando, by Virginia Woolf

This book has been on my must read list since I saw Sally Potter's exquisite adaptation back in 2004. I have to say that I was a little disappointed by the book. I generally have a love/hate relationship with Woolf's writing. I loved Mrs. Dalloway, Three Guineas, and A Room of One's Own, but absolutely hated To The Lighthouse, Between the Acts, and the recently published Carlyle's House and Other Skeches. I was very much hoping that Orlando would fall into the "love" category. Alas, it did not, but I was pleased to discover that it did not therefore fall immediately into the "hate" category.

There are serious flaws in this book, at least from my point of view as a reader for pleasure. Both action and genuine introspection were rare, and though centuries passed, the pace of the novel was far slower than it should have been. Woolf could certainly turn a phrase, but I found myself bored by her prose rather than energized by it. The only sequence of the novel where I felt like Orlando was anything other than a disinterested, cardboard cut-out observer of his/her life was at the very end, when Woolf's trademark brand of stream of consciousness took over from the biographical parody. Had I approached this book as an academic (something I don't do often anymore) I would have found it full of interesting things. There's an excellent exploration of the progression of English literature and criticism, no end of biographematic possibilities, all of which are overshadowed by the most fertile ground for the discussion of gender identity I've ever seen.

So while I didn't hate it, I didn't love it either. I approached the book as a casual reader and was bored by it (why else would a mere 314 pages have taken me weeks to read), but had I been more willing to work as a reader I probably would have found it remarkable. Potential readers should take that as a caveat (but everybody should go out and see Sally Potter's wonderful film adaptation).

Next: Ian Fleming's Thunderball.

Posted by August on 08.11.07 at 12:39 AM | Comments (0)

#33 - The Wild Palms, by William Faulkner

To begin, the cover image you see on the left is not what the cover of my copy looks like. It is, so far as I can determine, the cover of the most recent Vintage paperback edition; my edition is also a Vintage paperback, but was published in 1966, and has a rather tacky yellow and brown photo of some birds and marshes on the cover. My edition was also rather poorly typeset and printed, but the spine was nice and supple, so it still felt nice and comfortable in the hands. About the actual content of the book: it would be better to call this two separate, interlaced stories, joined more by common (and contrasting) themes, than a single, unified novel. The first tale, the one the novel opens with and spends the most pages on, is called "The Wild Palms" (the title of the novel was intended to be If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem, but was renamed The Wild Palms by Random House, the original publishers back in 1939), and concerns a young almost-doctor (Harry Wilbourne) and his mistress (Charlotte, who's last name I can't recall and can't be bothered to look up), the wife of another man, and the first woman he has ever loved (in all senses of the word). This storyline, like the other (which I will come to shortly), chiefly concerns the relationship between a man and a woman in desperate circumstances, although those circumstances are of their own choosing. Charlotte, for reasons that may have been clear to readers in 1939, but were not clear to me, is running away from a life with her successful, more or less kind husband, her children, and all the domestic bliss you could possibly imagine. She may or may not fall in love with Harry at a party (another thing that is not clear, but may have been to readers when it was originally published; writers in the 1920s and '30s—and American writers in particular, I find—had a way of saying things without saying them that is more obtuse than their European counterparts, and I often cannot figure out just what the hell they are trying to say), but he certainly falls in love with her. With virtually no conversation they decide to live together, and she leaves her husband. He (the husband) tries to offer them financial support, a move that I can actually understand; the jilted lover does indeed feel a strange mixture of anger, pain, and guilt, but also still feels a kind of proprietariness, an urge to continue protecting the happiness of the one he loves. At any rate, the lovers refuse his help, and they head out on the road to live a strange life, a life that is somehow both decadent and spare. Faulkner is not at his best in this part of the novel. I admit that I am not at all partial to these types of stories (I am reminded, though the similarities are only superficial, of Fitzgerald's Gatsby, a novel which I hated because it was vague, circular, and decadent, describing a myth of America which is often cited by Americans as the myth they love to tell about themselves, but which I have neither access nor an attraction to, and am therefore bored by), but Faulkner does not seem at home with the material. His language, the slow, dignified, graceful prose, almost biblical in its strength, is simply too ponderous and thoughtful for the flitting, wasteful, nearly insubstantial life that he is describing. Harry and Charlotte certainly believe there is substance to their quest (his towards a perfect and therefore unattainable love with a woman who does not, and never did, exist, and her away from a life she never felt at home in, but could never quite articulate why), but that substance never materializes. He becomes the angst-ridden teenage poet that most young men eventually grow out of, and she becomes frenetic, nearly crazed, but somehow still managing to embody a kind of archetype of the Practical Housewife. She dies, eventually, from a failed abortion she forces Harry to perform (the sequences describing her post-abortion decline and the consequences of her death, both at the beginning and end of the book, are the only genuinely strong portions of this story, the only times at which Faulkner is truly Faulkner). It was, at times, a struggle to finish the book more or less exclusively because of this storyline.

"The Old Man" is something different. "The Old Man" follows a convict from a Parcham, Mississippi work farm as he is dispatched during a flood to rescue two citizens trapped on their roofs. He and the pregnant woman he does manage to rescue are swept away down one of the Mississippi's many tributaries (the title of this storyline refers, of course, to the mighty river itself) and are effectively lost for about seven weeks. Neither the convict, nor the woman, nor, in fact, the baby she eventually gives birth to on the skiff, are ever named. The distance works for Faulkner, as it usually does. One of the strengths of his prose is how it is sober, concrete, and often clinical in tone; the actual content of his books, his stories and characters, are intensely human and quite complex emotionally. For most writers that kind of distance would rob them of the chance to fully explore their characters, but Faulkner seems to see it as an opportunity. Faulkner is in full form in this portion of the novel, with the convict being at once a blank space and a lightning rod for all the feelings the rest of the book evokes. The only fault, if it can be called such a thing, is that the entire storyline seems to be a set up (well, not really, that's just sort of what happens in the last sentence or two) for an elaborate joke about the general infidelity of the female sex.

In short: not his best book, but definitely worth checking out.

Next, Orlando, by Virginia Woolf.

Posted by August on 07.03.07 at 3:42 AM | Comments (0)

#32 - Looking For Jake, by China Miéville

This book is not so impressive as the other two I have reviewed here (at the time of this writing, you should be able to find both reviews simply by scrolling down the main page). While words like "clever" and "original" were the sort of thing to come to mind after reading King Rat or the more robust Perdido Street Station, the word that jumps to the fore after reading this collection of stories is "derivative". They aren't bad stories, really. "The Tain" definitely deserved all sorts of awards, and neither "Details" nor "Familiar" are the sort of thing that would have occurred to me in a million years, which is exactly the sort of thing good fantasy should be. I don't want my expectations confirmed, I want them denied. I want surprises. But. But but but but but. "The Ballroom" was so straightforward a ghost story that I had it pegged from page two, and "Reports of Certain Events in London", while executed competently (it was far too short) felt like nothing more than a knock-off of Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves. "Looking for Jake", the title story, is actually one of the collection's weakest, and will be familiar to anyone who has read the "World's End" sequence of Neil Gaiman's Sandman comics, even though Miéville chooses a slightly different execution. The style of the piece is also remarkably off-target. It takes pages upon pages before the narrator reveals that it's supposed to be epistolary, though it never quite feels like it is, and the bulk of the first half of the story is so abstract and circular that I'm surprised no editor ever had it excised for getting in the way of the story (which is exactly what it does). "Jack", the only New Crobuzon piece in the collection, was not a disappointment, however, and it was good to see the story told from an unexpected point of view. "An End to Hunger" missed the mark by so wide a margin that I was almost unable to finish the story. I wanted to shout "no, you fool, the Internet doesn't work like that, my grandmother could tell you the technology doesn't work like that", but I suppose it's asking a bit much to expect an author (generally notorious Luddites), and a fantasy author at that, to know very much about computers. The rest of the collection is solid but ultimately forgettable, bringing nothing new to the table. I hope that this represents a toe in the water, or a kind of apprenticeship, like the stories in Pynchon's Slow Learner, with Miéville realizing that, though he is a compelling writer of long-form fiction, shorter works are not at all where he shines.

Now, because it has been too long since I've read any of his work, and because I promised some Literature with a capital "L", and because I'm spending the weekend with a friend at a comic book convention and I like deliberate incongruities, I will now be reading The Wild Palms, by the inimitable William Faulkner.

Posted by August on 06.09.07 at 4:10 AM | Comments (0)

#31 - Equal Rites, by Terry Pratchett

It's about time. With this, the third Discworld novel, I can say that Terry Pratchett has hit his stride, and I finally understand what all the fuss is about. That's not to say their aren't problems with this book; there are problems with every book. If we were to go around behaving as though a book—any book—were perfect, we wouldn't be very good readers, now would we? The ending kind of sneaks up out of nowhere and becomes a giant, blazing action sequence full of bright lights and sound-effects (or descriptions of same) when the book, up until that point, had really called for no such thing. Pratchett was doing so well. Even though gender equality was the major theme of the book, Granny Weatherwax and Esk were people first and representatives of a gender second (or even third, actually), and the same could be said about the bulk of the (much less important) male characters. The story itself was mostly quiet without considerable adventure, and one got the impression that it was leading up to a coming of age kind of thing that would result in the strength of the characters resolving the plot. Instead, of course, a mostly unimportant back-story element was thrust to the fore to serve as the climactic point of conflict, and most of what had made this book much more solid and entertaining than the previous two was pushed aside so we could be given an ending straight out of Jerry Bruckheimer's play book. That being said, however, if this book had been as weak (although lightly entertaining) as the first two, I was going to give up on the series entirely, but a slap-dash ending didn't really spoil what was, for the first two hundred pages, a really well-executed comedy. Even though the other early Discworld novels are hard to find (the first three have been re-issued by Haper, but the others have not, to my knowledge) I will seek them out. The fantasy fans among my friends may rejoice, I am slowly turning to the Dark Side, or whatever Side it is that those folks have been bugging me to join for the better part of six years now.

Next, as I couldn't decide what I wanted to read, I randomly pulled a book from one of my shelves and came up Looking For Jake, by China Miéville. I promise I'll move into some capital-L Literature next, just so that this doesn't turn entirely into a genre-fiction year (I had actually originally intended it to be the year in which I read all those classics that have been sitting unopened on my shelves, but I suppose that says something about the strength of good intentions).

Posted by August on 06.06.07 at 2:29 AM | Comments (0)

#30 - For Your Eyes Only, by Ian Fleming

Despite being labeled as "A James Bond Novel" on the cover, this book isn't actually a novel; it's a collection of short stories (the first of which is actually "From A View to a Kill," a title which makes considerably more sense in the context of the story than it did for the film) with "For Your Eyes Only" being the most prominent. For the most part they are typical Bond fare, if on a smaller scale. They deal with Bond in between major assignments, which is actually quite refreshing, even if labeling it as a novel made the changes in continuity jarring (the stories are presented in the same format as the chapters in the previous seven books).

My favourite stories were actually two that had nothing to do with espionage. There was "Quantum of Solace" which was actually a meditation by the Governor of the Bahamas on romantic relationships between men and women and human interaction, with Bond listening and occasionally commenting. The reader winds up seeing a much more human side of Bond than in any other of the works, and it becomes clear just how vulnerable he actually is to his emotions, and how that drives him to push human connections, particularly with women, away. Speaking of women, I was almost willing to be pleased with Fleming's treatment of female characters in this book, but not quite. I don't know if he was writing to his audience's expectations, or if he actually believed that women at heart were weak and submissive (neither would surprise me, and I don't know which would disappoint me more). All the female characters, with the exception of the battered wife Liz Krest in the final story, "The Hildebrand Rarity" (the other non-espionage piece in the book; it focuses instead on compassion and empathy as Bond helps a woman cover up the murder of her rich, abusive husband), and Rhoda, the young woman in the Governor's tale (she is cruelty itself) start out strong and independent, but pass through stages where they are little more than sexual props or quivering figures of fear and servility. I suppose it's part of the Bond mythos, but it's both dull and irritating after a while (not to mention it makes the female characters less attractive as characters; who can bring themselves to care deeply for someone who cannot stand on their own two feet most of the time).

Next, Equal Rites, by Terry Pratchett.

Posted by August on 06.06.07 at 12:42 AM | Comments (0)

#29 - Despair, by André Alexis

I love this book. Let's get that right out of the way. I first encountered Mr. Alexis' work a few years back in a collection called And Other Stories... edited by George Bowering. It claimed to be a collection of cutting edge postmodern Canadian short fiction, and by and large it was (there were a few dogs; Atwood's contribution, taken from Good Bones, was probably the most glaring example), but it was Mr. Alexis' piece that impressed me the most. It was a remarkable piece about a strange, strange narrator called André Alexis (every male character in the story is named André Alexis, and every female character is Andrée) who is investigating the origins of mysterious love letter, addressed to a woman with the same name as his wife but intended for a woman in Ottawa, New York rather than Ottawa, Ontario. There was even a very clever bit in which a novel within the story begins (in different words) with a scene from the story itself. The story is called "My Anabasis" (an "anabasis" is a military expedition or advance, and is sort of obliquely appropriate as a title, although I won't explain why, as the mystery of the piece is part of its strangeness and its fun), and it's my favourite in this collection.

Coming a close second as far as favourites go is "The Road to Santiago de Compostela", which is about a group of Canadians from Ottawa traveling together on a train through Europe and exchanging stories to while away the time, having not yet adjusted to the time change. The piece reminds me of Chaucer (of course) but also of Neil Gaiman's Sandman series. The tone is very similar, both supple and straightforward, and the stories told by the travelers have many of the same fantastic elements. I did have trouble following some of the French bits, as Ontario's system of educating Anglophones in that language is rather lax, but I really only mention it as a caveat for those who are turned off by such things.

The other stories in Despair (the full title being: Despair and Other Stories of Ottawa) aren't quite up to the quality of those last two, but they are still quite good, and I look forward to reading Childhood, his first novel and only other book as far as I know. It sits on my shelf, waiting.

This evening I began reading For Your Eyes Only, by Ian Fleming (and my eighth Bond novel).

Posted by August on 06.05.07 at 12:54 AM | Comments (0)

#28 - Starship Troopers, by Robert A. Heinlein

It took me a while to determine why this book might be so controversial, though the fact of its publication in the late 1950s—at the emergence of the hippie generation—might have something to do with it. In straightforward terms it's a novel about a militaristic Roman-style republic set at an indeterminate point in the future. It's not really an adventure story; it delineates the structure of the military and its relationship to society at large by following the career of Juan Rico. Most reviews tend to focus on how Heinlein used the novel to expound his views on the responsibilities the individual has to the state, the role of military service in those responsibilities, and the cause of youth crime. Heinlein seems to believe that the only members of a society who deserve suffrage are those who have taken the safety of that society as a personal responsibility by serving in the military, and that youth crime is the result of adults not properly educating their children. I won't say that I agree with him, but I will say that it's obvious much of the backlash to this novel was the result of the fact that Heinlein argues his points in clear, compelling language. It's difficult to imagine winning a debate with Heinlein on these points, particularly since many of the problems he uses as evidence (urban and youth violence—random violence in particular—for example) have actually gotten worse, or at least are more visible and appear to have gotten worse, which is much the same thing in our society. He doesn't seem to be writing for an entirely adult audience, or at least not for a particularly sophisticated audience, but all the same his rather old-fashioned prose makes military life and comaraderie look very attractive. Having military personnel among my immediate family and in my circle of friends I also feel comfortable saying that his portrayal of those aspects of military service is actually quite accurate, as it fits closely with their own stories. I wouldn't recommend this book to everyone; an open mind towards the military and to other ideas is certainly a must if one is to give this novel a fair shake (as I said, I don't agree with all, or even most of Heinlein's ideas, but they certainly gave me quite a bit to think about). It's now one of my favourite science fiction novels.

Next (and I'm finally caught up, so this actually is the book I'm currently reading) is Despair and Other Stories of Ottawa, by the incomparable André Alexis.

Posted by August on 06.02.07 at 2:33 AM | Comments (0)

#27 - Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said, by Philip K. Dick

Nearly caught up! Well then, this isn't my first Philip K. Dick novel, but in some ways every Philip K. Dick novel is your first. Many of the major thematic elements will be the same, of course. They will always be concerned with paranoia, the implications of the development and use of mind-altering chemicals, the power of government, and so on. But every time you open a Philip K. Dick novel you can never quite be sure what you'll find, or how you'll emerge. (Plus, I've got to say that I love these covers. They are so un-Vintage, but so completely Philip K. Dick.) Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said doesn't disappoint, though it's obviously one of his earlier books. The prose is a bit stilted and his treatment of women borders on the misogynistic (which is not to say that his female characters become any more real in his later works, but his prose certainly gets better and his male characters are less Boys'-Own-Adventurish).

I won't pretend to have entirely understood this book, although on the surface it was fairly straightforward. (I think someday I'm going to make a list of words I over-use. "Although" will probably be at the top of the list.) Jason Taverner is the host of a prime-time variety show and a "six", a rare genetically engineered human. On Tuesday evening he leaves the studio with everything, money, fame, power and a beautiful, talented woman in his bed. When he wakes up the next morning he has none of it. It is not that he has been robbed or slandered or imprisoned. He has simply never existed. The totalitarian state that the US has become has no record of his birth, his television program does not air, his albums were never recorded, and his friends and lovers and incapable of recognizing his face. What follows is a paranoid romp through a strangely familiar world of drugs, a world-wide network for transferring information, incest, morality, and the nature of success (is it genetic? circumstantial?). This sounds rather vague, but seriously, you try writing about a Philip K. Dick novel without sounding like the dust jacket; it's impossible, you simply won't make any sense.

It's been a long time since I've read anything by Dick (the last was Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, and before that I think it was V.A.L.I.S., nearly ten years ago), but I won't be leaving things so long in the future. I've already got The Man in the High Castle in the queue.

Next is the last book before I'm fully caught up, Robert A. Heinlein's Starship Troopers.

Posted by August on 06.02.07 at 2:05 AM | Comments (0)

#26 - Perdido Street Station, by China Miéville

(NB: I also finished this book a few weeks ago; I'm still several books behind in my posting.) This is a much stronger book than King Rat, but it's not quite so easy to sink your teeth into. The world seems fairly complete, which is actually something I'm not used to in fantasy fiction (with the possible exception of David Eddings' work, and he is notoriously obsessive about economic and logistical detail), and it took considerable adjustment to cope with, because Miéville doesn't do a whole lot of info-dumping, at least not initially. (This can actually be a problem at times, as he also tends to stretch scenes of suspense far longer than they warrant and readers can be left in the dark for several chapters about issues that aren't significant enough to benefit from such treatment.)

As it's been a few weeks since I've read it (as opposed to the normal half-hour gap between reading the book and writing these things) I've forgotten the names of most of the characters, but in all honesty I didn't like any of them. This is a good thing, though. First, I actually think of them as characters rather than as simple cardboard cut-outs or plot devices; the fact that I don't like them is irrelevant, really. It doesn't keep me from enjoying the story. Isaac, the more or less protagonist somehow manages to be supremely selfish personally and passionately interested in social justice. This tends to keep him from being the generally featureless hero figure that folks complain about in lesser fantasy work but it does, as I mentioned earlier, keep him from being likable. Perhaps I would think differently if I were English rather than Canadian. I've often noticed that there is a kind of directness to protagonists in English fiction (especially in young characters) that would come across as rude or even openly hostile in Canadian society. An unrecognized cultural gap, perhaps? The book is chock full of characters, but most of them, while individualized, aren't quite developed, and it's easier to think of them as functions rather than people (Lin the damsel in distress, Yagharek the sympathetic alien, Motley the criminal mastermind, and so on).

Should I say some things about the world of New Crobuzon? Perhaps I should. The city itself is wonderfully realized, right down to street corners and a rich, ramshackle development that reminds me of any number of cities (London, Cairo, and my adopted home of Toronto all spring to mind), but little seems to be done to place the city in any kind of context, either historical or governmental. Is New Crobuzon part of a nation? Where is the original Crobuzon? What is its relationship to neighbouring communities? One or two of these things are brushed on, but the general sense seems to be that, at this stage at least, Miéville didn't think too deeply on these subjects, and New Crobuzon is an island emerging from the mist.

I don't want to leave the impression that I disliked the novel, so let me just say that I have acquired all of Miéville's other works, except the most recent Un-lun-dun (I think that's what it's called), and have every intention of reading them in the near future, so impressed was I by both King Rat and Perdido Street Station.

Next: Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said, by Philip K. Dick.

Posted by August on 06.02.07 at 1:54 AM | Comments (0)

#25 - King Rat, by China Miéville

(NOTE: I actually finished reading this book on April 28, but have been busy/distracted, and unable to finish this post until now.) I love mythologies. I love how they pour magic—real magic, with blood and smoke and sex and violence—into the world of they everyday. They remind us how animal and primitive and instinctual are the underpinnings of nearly everything we do. They are stories that show us our own, living, beating heart without flinching. So I'm always pleased to see a new (to me), well-crafted mythology. As I have said before, when discussing Terry Pratchett's The Color of Magic, I am not a dedicated fan of fantasy literature. But I will go out of my way to find good contemporary urban fantasy, something that puts the modern city at the heart of a fantastic tale, something like Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere, or now China Miéville's King Rat.

King Rat is pretty obviously a first novel, but here I think it's a strength; while the style is a bit rough, Miéville doesn't seem to be encumbered by any preconceived notions of what can and cannot be done in this type of fiction. King Rat draws heavily from folklore (the Pied Piper of Hamelin, and Anansi the spider, for example) but it never quite gives up its unique point of view or surrenders to the mundane. I will say that the deeper I thought about the book the more simple questions I had (where did these supernatural characters come from? What sort of society do they have, how come they look human, etc? How do they live their day to day lives?), but those are mostly questions of a reader used to realist fiction, and they are out of place in a sympathetic reading of this book. (That I cannot refrain from asking such questions is probably the biggest reason that I am not a dedicated reader of fantasy and science fiction, and also why I have never written a successful piece in either genre.) It was rollicking good fun. I was particularly pleased with how Miéville handled the drum and bass elements of the novel. Very few writers can do anything worthwhile with music, but he was quite successful at capturing the feel of the music and the drum and bass subculture.

Next, Perdido Street Station, also by China Miéville.

Posted by August on 05.24.07 at 5:32 PM | Comments (0)

#24 - Slow Learner, by Thomas Pynchon

Great cover, non? These stories, originally published in periodicals between 1959 and 1961, were not collected until the middle 1980s, and upon reading them, I can say that with good reason. With two exceptions ("Entropy" and "The Secret Integration"), they just aren't very good. Pynchon starts the collection with a twenty-five page essay examining the flaws and foibles of these pieces, even going so far as to offer bits and bobs of his autobiography to explain why X was X rather than Y. The uncritical reader will move from the introduction to the story, and because of Pynchon's rather hefty reputation, will see all the promise and genius blurbed about on the back cover (The New York Times, New Republic, and The New York Times Book Review all seemed to have hired non-critical readers to review this book, as they are the sources of the blurbs in question, and wow, how incredibly wrong they are). An easily influenced reader, and I admit to falling into this category at times, will read the introduction and then pick out all the flaws mentioned by Pynchon, and probably come to the same conclusion he did, that these stories are apprentice work at best. The critical reader, however, will see all of the flaws Pynchon outlined—and a few more, actually—but will also see, if not a remarkable talent, then at least the potential for a remarkable talent. If Pynchon were trying to establish a career for himself today, these stories would be best left off his CV, but their time has passed, Pynchon is Pynchon, and here we are.

The biggest issue with most of these stories is that that young apprentice Pynchon had absolutely no ear for prose. Their style is clumsy, jumping between baroque infodump and stark minimalism to no apparent purpose. Important details are often vague (and the prose during the only treatment of sex in these stories isn't just purple, it's Imperial Purple, and Pynchon is justifiably embarrassed by it). Narratives often stall or fall apart or simply end before they have made any kind of point. "Entropy" shows stylistic and thematic potential; the prose isn't exactly clear, and is from time to time surrealist, but the characters are interesting and though, just as the introduction said, the story doesn't need the entropic imagery running under everything, it's still good, functional, well-made imagery. "The Secret Integration" is a bit clumsy at the end and perhaps feels a bit like a morality play, but by this time there's no question at all that Pynchon is well on his way to becoming not only a compelling stylist, but a master craftsman. The story is rich and convincing, the characters real in a way they weren't in the other stories, and the various themes and plot elements were all given exactly the weight they deserved. Pynchon himself called it a journeyman story, since V. was already out earlier that year, and he was on his way. Journeyman story it is.

Watch out for more Pynchon in the future, but now it's time for King Rat, by China Miéville.

Posted by August on 04.25.07 at 1:47 PM | Comments (0)

#23 - Willful Creatures, by Aimee Bender

Aimee Bender's' books are impossible to find. Well, not quite impossible; I found this one, right? Next to impossible, then. I looked through every used bookstore in Toronto, and not a single copy of any of her books. Alright, I said to myself, I'll bite the bullet and try to find her books new (I prefer to buy new books, but it's been some time since my budget has allowed for that). I looked high and I looked low, and eventually I had to go to the The World's Biggest Bookstore, where they had all of her works. I chose Willful Creatures, and here we are. What does it say about Bender that I had such difficulty finding her books? It's not like I'd never heard of her. Aside from reading "The Case of the Salt and Pepper Shakers" in McSweeney's I've actually found myself running across her name quite a bit in the last few years, in newspapers, podcasts, and interviews with other authors. People who know about up and coming writers know about Bender, so why don't booksellers?

Willful Creatures is one of the most appropriate titles I've ever encountered for a collection of unlinked short fiction. All of these stories are strange, in their way (sometimes characters will be made of food, a detective pursues a trivial avenue of inquiry after a double murder, there is a world of tiny men existing below the larger world and sometimes its citizens are captured as pets), but each of her major characters acts in a way that can only be described as "willful". Even when they are drunk or depressed or succumbing to a bundle of disorganized neuroses it is the strength of their wills that pushes the action forward. The direction they push the action is never consistent; the man who buys the tiny person as a pet is alternately caring and cruel, and the boy with keys for fingers, even when most lonely, never lets himself stop trying to open doors.

There are a number of blurbs on the cover and in the first few pages make much of Bender's prose style, calling it "musical", among other things. It is not musical. Not at all musical. In fact, it's fairly standard pseudo-minimalist post-Hemingway formal American prose. That sounds like it's a mouthful, but chances are good that if you've read anything by Raymond Carver or any of a hundred American writers of the last few decades you know exactly what I mean. It's simple, clear, steady and robust. "Musical" is what critics with no ear and no imagination call any prose they happen to like.

Now I'm reading Slow Learner, by Thomas Pynchon.

Posted by August on 04.24.07 at 1:17 AM | Comments (0)

#22 - The Light Fantastic, by Terry Pratchett

Pratchett has always been very open about the fact that he writes light entertainment, although of course that doesn't mean that his work lacks wit or intelligence. The Light Fantastic is the second Discworld novel that I've read (well, technically the third, but as I can't remember anything about the first one, including its title, it doesn't count) and it is a definite improvement on the first. The parodies are sharper, and the world more developed (it still feels a little slapdash, though, and it's only towards the end that a setting from either novel repeats itself), but it still feels like it's not quite living up to its potential. I did enjoy the bureaucratic satire and the change in Rincewind's personality (it's always good to see a miserable character gain confidence through genuine means), and I'm looking forward to the next few, if I can find them in cheap editions.

Next up: Aimee Bender's book of short stories, Willful Creatures.

Posted by August on 04.21.07 at 8:47 PM | Comments (0)

#21 - Cat's Crade, by Kurt Vonnegut

I didn't remember a single thing about this book. With both Deadeye Dick and Slaughterhouse-Five the plot and characters reconstructed themselves in my memory, but with this book it was as though I had never laid eyes on it before. It was not so good as the other two books, although Vonnegut was younger when he wrote it, and I've heard that it was his first "serious" work. The click-clack rhythm that I noted in others didn't seem to be quite there yet, and a good deal of the satire seemed underdeveloped or tacked on as an afterthought. In some ways it reminded me of Christoper Moore's Island of the Sequined Love Nun, but far more dire, and far less obviously funny. The Bokononist religion turned out to be more interesting (and to make more sense) than I was expecting, but ultimately it didn't seem to have as significant an impact on the action and obvious themes of the book as it should have, given how saturated the pages are with it. I haven't read any of Vonnegut's works before this one, but while the potential of his later books is clearly visible here, it is also clearly only potential at this point. Maybe my standards are artificially high, I don't know.

Next, something deliberately lighter, Terry Pratchett's The Light Fantastic.

Posted by August on 04.21.07 at 1:40 AM | Comments (0)

#20 - Deadeye Dick, by Kurt Vonnegut

This book is too big. Vonnegut has come to be known as a satirist, a science fiction author, an observer of American life and perhaps one of the keenest commentators on the Twentieth Century. And he is, which makes this book too big. It's all there, in this book. Rudy Waltz and his neutered tone (still the steady clacking of a typewriter) is the vehicle for nearly every conceivable thing that can be said about American life in the decades just after WW2. The stupidity of gun violence saturates the book, although guns themselves make relatively few appearances, nuclear disarmament, the simultaneous beauty and pettiness of the art world, drug abuse, the rise of corporate culture, the immigrant story, the length and breadth of a man's guilt (both what he should and should not be held accountable for), it's all here and then some, in this tiny little slip of a book. Rudy Waltz looks on it all with the same dispassion, and it is disquieting, and overwhelming. It is too much to say anything coherent about so soon after reading it. I want to talk about how a chain reaction of wealth and happiness is set off because of the only unselfish act Rudy's father ever committed in his life, but to do that I'd have to explain about Rudy's father, and Vonnegut needed an entire book to do that. This book is too big, and there is too much to say. So instead I will say nothing at all. Except: read the book. (My copy is this little battered mass-market paperback, a format I generally hate, but that somehow feels okay when it's Vonnegut, like his work was meant to fit in your pocket and be with you always, easily.)

Next, the last Vonnegut book for a while, Cat's Cradle.

Posted by August on 04.20.07 at 1:49 AM | Comments (0)

#19 - Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut

Another re-read, sooner than I promised. And not the last; there are two more, at least, before the end of the month. I tend not to be the sort of person who adjusts his reading list to outside factors (the big exception being that when I am loaned a book, I nearly always read it right away, as it seems strange for me to hang on to property that's not my own until I "feel like" using it), but Kurt Vonnegut's death, though I was never a very dedicated fan, made me strangely sad, and I want to remember him by revisiting the three books of his that I read back in the late '90s. Slaughterhouse-Five was my first foray into the trio, mostly because it was the only one whose plot I remembered. What I had forgotten was how poignant and emotionally charged the seemingly dead-simple prose was.

Vonnegut's work is always very obviously the work of some guy sitting behind a typewriter. That's a strange thing to say, so let me explain. Nearly every author of fiction has his own rhythms, and though it's not always clear how they work (not to mention re-writes, correcting proofs, editorial aid or interference), every so often you can infer from the rhythms the smooth stroke of the pen, the cut and paste of the word processor, or in Vonnegut's case, the steady locomotive clack of a good old-fashioned typewriter. It's impossible to imagine him writing any other way. His prose is rooted in the IBM Selectric (insert your own Platonic ideal of the typewriter here).

It's easy to dismiss the science fiction elements of this book as mere metaphor. Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time, journeyed to a faraway world and fathered a child with an actress whose picture he saw in a dirty bookstore in Times Square, all of it existing only in his head, a symptom of a cracked consciousness whose bits can no longer cohere, and are slowly falling away. Like the Kilgore Trout book Pilgrim finds in the bookstore, about the aliens who misinterpret (or do they?) the message of Christianity, looking on the science fiction elements in this way would be an error of scale. If we are to look at this as Billy Pilgrim (and because of some interesting narrative devices, Vonnegut himself, who is not only the narrator but also a character) simply falling apart because of post-traumatic stress brought on by living through the Dresden fire bombing, then we are left only with the singular; a human experience rather than human experience. If we accept the Tralfamadorians as real, then we have to accept Billy Pilgrim acceptance of the world, of humanity in all its glory and horror as real, and we have to face the facts that we, as a society and as a species, are equally as deplorable as we are noble, and that we always will be, no matter how much we put labels like "inhuman" on certain things we do. What we can do, is look at the good things, the good times, and hope there are more of them than the bad, and do our best to stay where everything is beautiful and nothing hurts.

Next, Kurt Vonnegut's Deadeye Dick.

Posted by August on 04.18.07 at 10:18 AM | Comments (0)

#18 - The Writing Life, edited by Maria Arana

I'm not good with books of essays. I have to switch gears too many times, have to move from one world view to another too quickly (especially if, as in this case, the book is the work of many authors rather than just one). There is also the issue that essays are, or at least should be, works of non-fiction, and I have difficulty evaluating non-fiction that isn't strictly academic. It's not that I don't understand it; I just don't know what to do with it, where to put it. Non-fiction makes the claim of being more or less factual, but outside of the realm of the academy, where the work is mostly straightforward and boring, non-fiction pushes the same buttons as fiction, and some of the wires get crossed in my head. My brain says to me, I want to process this as factual, but it's sending me a bunch of the same signals as the stuff that's supposed to be made-up. Make of that what you will.

This collection is all pieces from a series run by The Washington Post Book World. They are mostly short, each piece being introduced by editor Maria Arana, who also wrote an introduction for the entire volume. Some of the best writing in here, somewhat surprisingly, is hers. What I found was a fairly clear division in emphasis between certain kinds of writers. The journalists, no matter what section of the book their places were in (there are sections on motivation, source material, looking back on your own work, etc.), tended to focus on doing the research, connecting with their subjects, and getting the facts straight. They were completely unconcerned with style, and with one or two exceptions it was virtually impossible to distinguish them; if you were to jumble their bylines and remove the biographical data I doubt that anyone would have noticed the difference. The biographers were all very similar to the journalists in their emphasis, but they had widely varying voices and styles. I gave as much attention to the essays by non-fiction authors as I did to poets and novelists, but to be honest I didn't really care. Most of them wrote about Great Americans or Great Moments in American History, and if you'll pardon my language, I just don't give a shit. Throw a rock into a roomful of a hundred American writers of non-fiction and you'll hit sixty that write on those themes, thirty five who write about themselves (again, who cares?), and five who actually write about something of interest to the rest of the world. I much prefer writers who make stuff up.

The real reason I picked up this book, and the reason that it took me less than a week to read, instead of the standard two or three weeks with most works of non-fiction, is because of the likes of Carol Shields, Michael Chabon, Julian Barnes, and Umberto Eco. These writers are far more concerned with style than any sort of veracity. Some of them (Shields in particular, dating her piece August 13^th, 2000, my twenty-first birthday) were incredibly candid about their relationship to their work once it was out there in the world, and it was refreshing to note that not all writers are Richard Ford or Norman Mailer, supremely, arrogantly confident. (I had a chuckle when Carol Shields was claimed as an American author; she was born and raised there, but wrote in and about Canada, and she loved this place as much as we, I hope, loved her. She is ours.) Some of the novelists put a distance between themselves and the work, acknowledging biographical influences but treating the work almost like a game (I'm looking at you, Eco), and others treated the work like a calling, rhapsodizing and building a wall of metaphor to isolate themselves from the nuts and bolts of the work. I can sympathize with both views; like Michael Chabon I am paranoid that readers (what few there are; hopefully there will be more in the future, when some of my projects find a home) will recognize the wrong things in my work as autobiographical, and I will be either vilified or mocked as being self-righteous, and like others I do feel the work is a kind of calling, a thing that must be done rather than a thing that I simply want to do. But really kids, you still have to sit down and do the damned work (playwright Wendy Wasserstein and some of the "pop" writers wrote excellent pieces that negotiated those two issues in interesting and useful ways).

It's not always as good as it could be (Jimmy Carter? Please.), but this collection was one of the best of its kind that I have read, and it will stay in an easy to reach place on my bookshelf for a while to come.

Next, to acknowledge the great man's passing, I will be re-reading Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, and possibly a few others.

Posted by August on 04.17.07 at 1:22 PM | Comments (0)

#17 - Night of the Avenging Blowfish, by John Welter

Don't let the ridiculous title (or the appalling cover) fool you; this book is more Catch 22 than The Bathroom Reader. In fact, it's so much like Catch 22 that the protagonist may as well have been named Yossarian rather than Doyle Coldiron (it's no coincidence that there is a plug from Heller on the front cover). Doyle is a US Secret Service agent who suffers from depression and loneliness that result, in part anyway, from the secrecy surrounding his job. Where the book differs most from Catch 22 is not in the specific characters and situations (I mean, they are different, of course, but that has little impact thematically), and not in the prose style (which is incredibly simple and straightforward and logical to the point of absurdity), but rather in the fact that the sense of insanity and futility comes, not from a ridiculous and high-stress situation, but rather from the malaise of living in the modern, every-day world, and trying to make a human connection in that world. It's not difficult to see why Doyle is chronically and clinically depressed. He's in love with a married woman, unable to talk about his job, dealing with the near pointlessness of his job most of the time, surrounded almost exclusively by people who are in the same absurd situation, but many of whom (I'm thinking of the politicians, here) seem to think themselves far more important that all other people—and he's aware of how ridiculous and hopeless a situation this is. One gets the sense that if all of us were aware of just how much like life this book truly is, we would all be as depressed and self-hating as Doyle. Welter's humour can of often be a little obvious, but without it this book would be a depressing slash-your-wrists-after-reading-it slog, but instead it's light and quick. I generally have a ban during April and May (for deeply personal reasons I cannot share) on books known to be depressing, and had I known how low this book can get, I would have held off reading it. But that doesn't mean you should.

Next is The Writing Life: Writers on How They Think and Work, edited by Marie Arana (a collection of essays from The Washington Post Book World).

Posted by August on 04.12.07 at 11:40 AM | Comments (0)

#16 - Noise, by Russell Smith

I actually finished this book on Monday night, but have not had the time to write about it until now. Smith is a favourite of mine, one of my very favourite living Canadian writers, in fact, and this was the last of his fiction that I had to track down. I'm not sure if it's available from another publisher, but this particular copy was from The Porcupine's Quill. For anyone not already familiar with TPQ, some explaining will be necessary. They are a small Canadian press, notable for two things: first, they publish well-written books by emerging or under-appreciated authors, and second, in terms of their status as objects, they publish the ugliest books known to man. This seems like an exaggeration on my part, and I assure you that it is not. I have several TPQ books, but let's just use Noise as an exemplar, as it is fairly typical. I'm pleased to report that it's a trade paperback, which is the finest format for fiction, in my opinion, but sadly it's over-sized, and is actually about the same dimensions as a hardback, with equally tight binding, making it unnecessarily heavy and awkward to hold. The paper stock they chose is exquisite, far too high-quality for anything other than a special edition, frankly, although this isn't one. The choice is doubly strange, as they seem to have chosen the cheapest, most fibrous and poorly-finished cover stock available. It has some kind of laminate peeling back from the edges, but only the outside; inside the cover feels like wet cardboard. As a further disgrace, the typefaces chosen for the book are ugly and inappropriate, with the presentation face (the font used for the titles and chapter headings and such) being so ugly it could have been downloaded from the internet bundled with hundreds of smiley face pictures and a program to turn your mouse pointer into an animation of a flamethrower. The layout isn't too terrible, although chapter transitions are inconsistent and there isn't enough space left at the top margin, so even though it's an over-sized book, the page feels cramped. And the cover! Oh my God, the cover. The picture I've included, while accurate in its way, cannot really convey how god-awful and monstrous is the orange of this cover (and I like orange, it's the the colour scheme of this website, for crying out loud). To top it off, TPQ used a horrible black and white stock photo and followed the "I don't