Posted in January 2012 …

Jan 31 2012
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Fiction, Literature

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

The Short Version: Oscar de Leon, a young Dominican boy, grows up an overweight, socially awkward nerd.  Of course as it turns out, it might not entirely be his fault – there’s been a curse on his family, a fukú, for generations and he’s just the most recent one to be on the receiving end.

The Review: How has it taken me so long to read this book?  After all the awards, all the hype… is it because I was afraid I’d be let down?  I can’t imagine that to be true – after all, I’ve tackled so many other hyped-up books in the intervening years since this was released.  So really I don’t have an answer.  But I’m glad I’ve finally been forced to read it (it was the most recent BookClub pick) because it’s absolutely hype-worthy.

I’ll admit: my enjoyment of the book was undoubtedly heightened by the fact that I, too, am a nerd.  Yes, I can hear you gasp and I know you’re staring at your screen, agape in astonishment.  It’s shocking.
But in all seriousness, I love me some solid fantasy and some good sci-fi.  I always have and undoubtedly always will.  My tastes have become a little more refined as I’ve gotten older, so I’m pickier about the sci-fi especially… but when Díaz dropped a Captain Trips reference like six pages in, I was done.  Hook, line, and sinker.  I’m curious to see how others – people less nerdy than yours truly, you might say – reacted to the constant peppering of references throughout the book.  I didn’t get all of them but I caught most of them and, for me, they heightened the reading experience because I immediately had this kinship with Oscar.  I was bullied in school for being a reader and a nerd – so there was an element of kinship.  Although, as Díaz points out, Oscar was a super-nerd who even I’d have stayed away from.  But that’s neither here nor there.

The book itself is not quite what I expected, I have to admit.  I think Díaz’s voice is fantastic: the footnotes (mentioned so recently on this blog) were refreshing and witty, the smart-ass tone of Yunior (our narrator who is not, we later find out, just an omniscient voice), and the unabashed cultural tone set throughout the book make this something truly new.  There’s plenty of Spanish scattered through the novel and while I’m ordinarily upset about not having a translation of such things… I wasn’t, this time around.  I think that’s because, in my head, I didn’t need to know exactly what was being said because I sure as hell caught the tone.  It was like watching a Spanish soap opera: you definitely know what’s happening, even if you don’t catch every word.

I had a few issues, structurally, with the book – although I’m not sure if they’re really issues so much as it wasn’t what I expected and as a result I pushed back slightly.  See, only about half of the book is about Oscar.  (And his last name isn’t Wao – that comes out of a riff on calling him Oscar Wilde in college.  It happens maybe three times in the space of about two pages.  This confused me a bit.)  Instead, it’s actually about his family and about the curse.  Which is fascinating – the references to In The Time of the Butterflies were a nice throwback to high school for me in a different way, as I still remember standing in front of Rob Henry’s AP English class my junior year and reading a scene from that book while “Letters From The Wasteland” by The Wallflowers played – but I just didn’t expect it.  The book is as much about Trujillo and the DR as it is about Oscar himself.  This is neither bad nor good, simply an observation.  If I had to come down on one side, I’d say good, actually.  This is entirely due to Díaz’s writing, too.  I mean, the first footnote of the novel starts with “for those who missed your mandatory two seconds of Dominican Republic history” or something along those lines… and that sort of snarky tone is my jam.

Rating: 5 out of 5. I liked, most of all, the way this book made me feel.  It has been an odd 2012 in many ways, none moreso than the weather… and reading this book in the midst of this early spring (the ground here in NYC is starting to thaw.  and it’s the end of January.) just felt right.  It wasn’t quite a beach book, although there are many beaches and hot girls in tiny bikinis, and yet it also wasn’t a book that could’ve fit any other weather.  Something about reading this book right now felt 100% correct – and that’s a wonderful experience.  After a spate of good/meh books, I was thrilled to read something that I absolutely tore through, that I didn’t want to put down even as the curtain was rising on Kevin Spacey as Richard III.  If I had a few issues that kept it from the +, that doesn’t really matter – the good far outweighed the few moments of bad.

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Jan 29 2012
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Fiction, Literature

The Mezzanine

The Short Version: The hour-long lunch break of a young gentleman wherein he thinks about (among other things) shoelaces, straws, escalators, driving, CVSes, earplugs, adulthood vs. childhood, and bathroom etiquette.

The Review: A curious little book, this one.  A good friend of mine and fan of the show recommended it quite a while ago – I can’t entirely remember under what circumstances, other than being generally a book conversation – and I put it on my wishlist… but without much urgency.  Wanted the British edition (a far better cover, for sure) and sister came through in spades at Christmas.

It’s a short book – a novella, really – but it requires far more active reading than you’d expect out of a short book about frivolous things.  For one thing, the main character is smart and the speed of his thoughts prove it.  The constant jumping from point to point, story to story – hell, the layering of thoughts within thoughts via footnotes (a conversational tactic I’ve been accused of abusing) is enough to ensure that you are DEFINITELY paying attention when you read.

It’s interesting to read this book after having been exposed to the footnote gambit for quite a long time.  I mean, Terry Pratchett has been doing it since before Baker wrote this book – but David Foster Wallace and Dave Eggers and Lisa Lutz all owe a huge debt to Baker: this book feels like the true start of that trend.  Wallace’s footnotes are more akin to these – they don’t serve as an observation on the plot but rather as a tangential thought, at the end of which you will return to the primary thought and continue along your way.  Eggers and Pratchett and Lutz (although I’m loathe to categorize Eggers alongside two actually-talented authors) use footnotes in this way but they also use them to make witty asides or dash a bit of random humor into a scene.  Baker’s footnotes, while amusing, aren’t necessarily intended to be – they just simply exist and if you find them funny, then great.

There’s not really a plot to the book – it’s truly a stream of consciousness… although now that I say that, I’m not sure that it is, actually.  It doesn’t flow uninterrupted from one point to the next and there are some occasionally jarring transitions.  It isn’t, as I sort of thought going in, like the unadulterated ramblings of a crazy person like me.  And Baker hints at this as you get into the novel, revealing that he’s writing from the future (well, the future to that 23-year-old self) – and there are even some jumps in time and space.  So I’m having trouble actually rooting the book down to anything in particular.

The thoughts themselves are interesting and occasionally hilarious.  The observations on straws, shoelaces, escalators, driving, etc etc etc are all thoughts that I’ve had or, when brought up here, made me stop and consider the thought in question.  But as a result, I wonder if the profundity of the novel was less for me than it might’ve been for someone else who doesn’t spend serious amounts of time considering the way things work and why things are the way they are in a very fundamental way.  This isn’t a judgment – it’s just an observation, as it were.  I can’t say for sure, it’s just a thought.  Nothing about this book feels lasting to me other than the impact the book had on later writers – because I can see Baker in so many other authors but I can’t honestly say that this primary source is so wildly exciting, having lived with the others for so long.

Rating: 3.5 out of 5.  The book is funny and thought-provoking to an extent, but it’s also just… a blip.  It’s more profound than Perec’s observations on the mundanities of life (perhaps because it doesn’t overstay its welcome…) but that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily Profound in the way a good piece of philosophy can be.  It’s an interesting oddity of a book but I can’t say I’ll see it having any lasting place in my memory down the road.

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Jan 26 2012
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The House of Silk

The Short Version: Sealed up for nearly one hundred years on account of it being too shocking for immediate publication, Dr. John Watson brings us a ‘lost’ tale of Sherlock Holmes from 1890 that features perhaps the most horrifying crime they ever dealt with.  What starts off as a rather ordinary Holmesian mystery quickly takes a darker turn as the companions are overwhelmed by a shadowy organization at every move.  Holmes is imprisoned, Watson kidnapped, and even Mycroft is unable to bring his considerable influence to bear – because the House of Silk is a special group, catering to a special perversion, and they hold blackmail on all of their clients.  It will take all of Holmes and Watson’s considerable skills and nerves to bring down the heinous institution… and even then, there’s no guarantee that they’ve fully succeeded.

The Review: I’ve read a handful of Holmes-continuation novels over the years (even reviewed one here) but I can safely say that none of them have ever measured up to the original – or even, happily, to this story.  This is the best Holmes novel since Sir Conan Doyle was writing them.  It’s not ACD but it is truer in letter and spirit than almost any adaptation or continuation since.  I say this with a deep love for the Moffat-led BBC Sherlock, Guy Ritchie’s just-plain-fun films, and even the classic I-grew-up-watching-them Basil Rathbone films.  All of those capture certain aspects of the characters or the scene… but this is the first time since reading the complete works (which I’ve done many times over, I daresay) that I can honestly feel truly satisfied.

Everything is there.  Watson’s unique narration, Holmes’ quirks (the Strad, the cocaine, the awesome intellect), Mrs. Hudson, 221B, The Irregulars, Lestrade, Mycroft – even Moriarty makes a surprise appearance.  The elements are all there, but that’s simple enough to do.  I’ve done it in this paragraph.  The real question is: does the tone work?  It most certainly does and this is Horowitz’s biggest success.  Sure, there are some issues with some of the comments an older Watson makes – his reflections are a little maudlin and a little too “looking back on the canon” worshipful at times.  We all know Lestrade and how Holmes appreciates him – what we don’t need is commentary on his future.  We don’t need to know that Mycroft is still alive and teaching.  This ‘continuation’ feels much more like an epilogue because of those moments and that, if anything, is disappointing: what the world needs now is more Sherlock Holmes novels, let me tell you.  I’m all for more Holmes and more Bond – although Bond is re-updated to the 21st Century and while that’s okay for Bond, Holmes is Holmes and thus can never leave the late 1800s.  As the famous quote says, it’s always 1895 for John and Sherlock.

But on the whole, Watson’s voice is as clear as ever.  Holmes, too, is the same as he has ever been.  In fact, having seen so many versions of Holmes stories of late, I found myself imagining the characters as a cross-section of their filmed counterparts.  Rathbone is, of course, Holmes (although perhaps without the deerstalker).  Jude Law is our Watson, Una Stubbs our Mrs. Hudson.  Stephen Fry’s portrayal of Mycroft, if played with Mark Gatiss’ sharpness, is perfection – and Jared Harris (were he a bit taller) is a perfect Moriarty.  As for Lestrade… well, take your pick.   The characters are all there and we can see the way the modern interpreters have paid their forms of homage to the originals – in fact, those homages are all the more clear thanks to Horowitz’s pitch-perfect pastiche.  It’s as though this was, in fact, a lost ACD story from years after he retired the detective for good.

I will say that the plot is a tad shocking, especially for a Holmes novel.  Child prostitution is the hip thing (sorry, bad way to phrase it) in mystery novels these days and so I was initially a little concerned when that point raised its head in this story.  But it is not as though it is a new phenomenon.  Indeed, this novel sheds more light on the remarkable man’s incredibly complicated inner life in the same way “A Scandal in Bohemia” does.  Where that story sheds some light on his feelings towards women, this one examines his feelings towards children.  Holmes is wracked by the death of one of his Irregulars and he takes numerous occasions to reflect on the ethics of sending these children, no matter how street-wise, into danger.  His fury at the end of the novel is a sight to behold as well – because it fits so perfectly with the man we all know exists inside of the Sherlock presented to the rest of the world.

Rating: 4.5 out of 5.  It does carry on a bit – the bits with Watson getting all nostalgic could’ve gone, for certain – but it is still one hell of a novel.  We won’t see the likes of ACD again – but I’m stunned by the success of Horowitz’s pastiche.  It isn’t like Devil May Care, where Faulks was ‘writing as Ian Fleming’.  There are no pretensions about who is writing and that it is an Anthony Horowitz novel.  But there’s also a reason this is the first authorized new Holmes novel from the Conan Doyle estate – it’s the first one to fully recapture the spirit of Baker Street in 1895, with the fog swirling about and the sound of a violin wafting down to the street.  If you pull your coat around you a bit tighter against the London chill, you’ll see a Doctor limp up to the door and moments later, through the open window, a familiar voice cries “The game is afoot, Watson” – and it’s like the magic never went away.

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Jan 22 2012
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Dickens 2012, Fiction, Literary Challenges, Literature

A Tale of Two Cities

The Short Version: In the years leading up to the French Revolution, an old man named Manette is reunited with his estranged daughter many moons after having been imprisoned and forgotten about.  He, with his daughter, returns to England under the auspices of a man named Lorry.  As the daughter grows into a beautiful young woman, she meets and marries an dashing French emigre named Darnay.  As it turns out, Darnay is more than an emigre: he’s an aristocrat.  When he returns to Paris at the height of the Terror, their peaceful world is disrupted and only through the workings of their dearest friends does the story have a happy ending.

The Review: So begins Dickens2012!  It’s so strange to me that this is the first time I can honestly say I’ve completed an entire unabridged Dickens novel.  Dickens and Hemingway were strangely absent from my academic career.  Also Faulkner and Joyce, for those keeping track.  But no matter – this is Dickens’ year and by god I’m going to do him right.

So then: A Tale of Two Cities.  A book that has the distinctive quality of having an oft-quoted opening sentence AND an oft-quoted closing one.  We all know how the story begins – and as Carton heads to the knife, his immortal last thoughts begin with “It is a far, far better thing I do than I have ever done…” I mean, what beautiful and evocative prose.  The lines are so cliched now that it is difficult to separate them from our present reality… but imagine reading that right when it was written!  What I’m saying is: I drink the Dickens kool-aid.

At the same time, the man can be insufferable.  While this book didn’t suffer from the bloat that characterizes certain other works (my only other attempt at a full Dickens was Our Mutual Friend my senior year of college.  It will surprise no one to hear that I read maybe 100 pages total…), it also doesn’t quite fly like it should.  When Charles returns to Paris, the stakes ramp up considerably and the book starts to take off and insist that you turn the pages… but then it hits weird bumps, as though Dickens couldn’t help but write a bit more than he needed to.  Example Number One: the letter that is presented at Darnay’s second Parisian trial.  Written by Manette while imprisoned, it reveals the ugly history that Manette and Darnay had agreed never to discuss or disclose and it provides some crucial backstory – but it also goes on far too long.  I mean, seriously.  It goes on ad nauseum.  To the point that it complete undercuts the momentum that has been building into those final scenes.  The sequence where Darnay, just returned home, is arrested again is surprisingly tense – so why does Dickens feel the need to lower the stakes by boring us with this story?  It’s a fascinating conundrum.

Of course, we read Dickens for a specific reason: his characters.  I don’t know anyone who can’t recall specific characters in a Dickens work – even if they just know A Christmas Carol and the Muppet version at that.  There’s a reason these characters survive in our collective consciousness and that is, quite simply, that they’re so real they seem like people we have met.  Even the relatively broadly stroked characters of this book (come on – Lucie is about as two-dimensional as they get) are fascinating and some of them do transcend their mundane counterparts: Madame Defarge is, quite simply, terrifying.  The image of her sitting, with her knitting, eyes pouring over the crowd… that’s indelible.  That’s a character I won’t soon forget.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about this novel, for me, was to read an Englishman’s take on the French Revolution some 50 years after the fact.  You don’t necessarily think about it when you pick up the book – but this was one of the earliest works of what we know now and love as historical fiction.  It blends together because Dickens was writing in the 1850s, the Revolution is closer in time than the present… but it’s like Matthew Weiner writing Mad Men today.  Dickens is looking back at a time and making subtle winks to a readership who is still connected enough to the time that they get the jokes – but also far enough removed that they can look back and say “my god, how barbaric!”  The lines about the American Revolution were hilarious – and probably still moderately uncomfortable for Dickens’ English readership – and to hear about Soho in the days when it was still mostly fields… well that’s a magic in and of itself.

Rating: 4 out of 5.  Although it took me a little while to warm into it – and I was reading it during an intensely stressful week – I found myself gripped by the book in a way I wasn’t anticipating.  When you get into the swing of Dickens, there’s something relaxing about it.  It’s almost as though you get to detach and let your mind drift a bit because you’re so at ease.  I think it has something to do with his writing and that sense of capturing people who are so human that they must, in fact, be real.  And man, those last hundred pages are downright gripping.  I challenge you to get to the end and not feel a sense of excitement and relief and sadness as that man goes to the “far far better thing” and the blade sings down.

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Jan 12 2012
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Two Challenges – and an invitation

Hello, folks!  A proper Happy New Year to all of you – a bit belated, I admit.

Anyway, for those of you who are literary prognosticators, you’ll know that yesterday was a big day: The Morning News dropped the 2012 Tournament of Books bracket.  I’m proud to say that I accurately predicted half of the bracket this year, which is personally very exciting – but even more exciting, I’m pretty sure I want to read at least 12 of this year’s titles.  Already got 4 out of the way, so no sweat… right?

CHALLENGE ACCEPTED.  I shall read no fewer than 12 of this year’s Tournament of Books books by the end of 2012.  Most likely to not be read: The Cat’s Table, Salvage the Bones, The Devil All the Time, The Stranger’s Child, The Last Brother.  Yes I know that’s five – I’m betting against myself a little bit.  But so long as I read more than 8, I will have done better than last year.  (Interestingly, I’ve yet to read anything off the ’07 list.  Fun fact.)

Also, for those of you following me on Goodreads, you’ll see that I’ve started on my other year-long project: Dickens 2012.  It’s Charles Dickens’ two-hundredth birthday this year and I got a sexy-as-hell set of “The Great Works” (Penguin Classics, covered by the amazing Coralie Bickford-Smith) for Christmas – so it’s on.  First up: A Tale of Two Cities.  Last up: A Christmas Carol in Dec 2012.  Other books to be included: Bleak House, Great Expectations, Hard Times, and Oliver Twist.  CHALLENGE ALSO ACCEPTED.

 

So anyway, a little bit of literary goal-setting to truly kick off the year.  How about you – any literary goals you’re setting yourself?

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Jan 11 2012
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Fiction, Literature

The Face Thief

The Short Version: Margot takes a tumble down a flight of marble stairs, nearly dying in the process.  Meanwhile, two men deal with the intrusion of an intriguing and potentially dangerous woman into their otherwise mundane lives.  It is, of course, the very same woman – and who was it who pushed her?

The Review: This book feels like an introduction to me.  It feels like a prologue – like a prequel made ten years after the original movie that didn’t really need to be made because you were already familiar enough with the character that you didn’t need that background “how they got started” story.  It was better in your head.  Except this is the first novel featuring this character, Margot.  So this is our first introduction to her and while she is interesting and engaging enough that I could certainly see her sticking around, I’m not sure that the book itself has much to truly recommend itself.

A review I read mentioned Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley novels in comparison to this one – now, I haven’t read any of them but I saw the film of The Talented Mr. Ripley and so I see the resemblance.  This is what I mean when I say that Mr. Gottlieb could undoubtedly take this book and turn it into a series, featuring our anti-hero conning her way around the world.  But the problem is, there’s just something lacking.

The book is well-written – I mean, it flies by and you can’t write that if you aren’t a talented writer.  To truly write a book that nearly flies out of your hands, not for want of “what happens next” (that’s another, higher skill) but simply for the propulsive beat underneath the words (like a really good song that gets you dancing before you even realize it)… that’s a skill and Mr. Gottlieb has it.  The book demands to be read quickly – to take your time with it would do a disservice.  That’s why I read it in approximately 24 hours.  Sometimes that sort of thing happens.

But there’s a flaw in this book, one that would make me hesitate before returning to Margot’s story or even another novel written by Mr. Gottlieb: the characters themselves.  Margot is, so far as I can tell, super-sexy and confident and a bit of a sociopath man-eater.  She had a terrible childhood with a drunk of a father – but that’s not enough to justify her apparent need to ruin men.  I felt like I missed a piece of the story at some point and that’s… well, that’s a bummer.  Because I wanted that justification.  I wanted to understand who Margot was – because it felt like (if this is the origin story ‘prequel’ that we might not’ve gotten in another universe where her story goes on) I wasn’t going to get another chance.  From here on, Margot would be this known quantity.  So why didn’t the author take the opportunity to flesh her out a bit more?

The coolest thing about the novel is the amount of knowledge Gottlieb brings to the table regarding faces and body language.  It’s a supremely interesting field and such a widely ignored one.  We betray so much with our body language and our expressions – even the most talented actors have to try to be something other than they are (and that’s exactly why they’re so talented).  Our author clearly did his research and so it’s quite fun to hear the characters talk about their abilities and for the reader to see those abilities in action.  Considering the fact  that the plot is a bit of a non-starter (it’s obviously from pretty early on who ends up pushing her and how the stories all connect), that’s the most unique and interesting talking point about the novel – and one that can be taken so much further, should the author be so inclined.

Rating: 3.5 out of 5.  Maybe I’m making it up – maybe this is a one-off novel.  But if that’s the case, I’m actually less inclined to like it.  The book gets an extra half star from me because it has promise.  There’s something interesting and intriguing and I’d like to see it taken further.  There aren’t enough sexy con-women in the world. But if Margot comes back and we get to see her put her skills to use in a more exciting and interesting (i.e. less expository) way… well, that could be a lot of fun.
Anyway, I have to thank Harper Collins for shooting me an advance copy of this book.  It was a fun, if sort of ho-hum, read and I do hope to see what happens next!

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Jan 10 2012
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Fantasy, Fiction, Literature

The Night Circus

The Short Version: The circus arrives without warning.  It stays for a few days, open from dusk til dawn, and then disappears without a trace.  Those who visit the circus feel as though they’re sucked into some kind of dream – a dream that feels more real than their own waking lives.  But behind this wondrous creation of magic and invention is a struggle between two combatants who’ve placed their pawns on the table and created an epic playing field – but who don’t realize that those pawns are bound together in more ways than they can comprehend.

The Short Version: What a triumph.  It is a first novel and so, yes, let me dispatch with the quibbles first: there are some pacing/structure issues (the 1902 plot is interesting but jarring, chronologically) and the denouement is a little sacharine (a cliché is a cliché, no matter how well presented).  Beyond that, I cannot find a flaw.  In fact, I’m having trouble returning myself to reality from the experience of reading this novel.  I shall attempt to first compare it to other experiences and perhaps discuss those in order to then get to discussing the novel itself.

First: punchdrunk.  For those of you unacquainted, get acquainted.  They are a British theatre company specializing in immersive theater… but not the sort of immersive theater you are probably aware of.  If you’ve been to New York recently/follow theater, you’ve undoubtedly heard of Sleep No More (Bostonians are possibly aware of it from the A.R.T. run in 2009) – and interestingly enough, Ms. Morgenstern was inspired by this very show in that Boston run.  I’m not surprised: the experience of the circus feels like a punchdrunk show.  In fact, I want them desperately to turn their brilliant minds towards creating Le Cirque du Rêves in reality.  The circus is this massive sprawling thing, composed of circles and looping paths with tents that are mind-bogglingly beautiful and magical.  In one, an ice palace.  In another, a cloud labyrinth.  In another, an illusionist who is truly magical.  And so on and so on.  Tents you can’t imagine, tents you’ll never see, tents you’ll keep returning to.  The experience of a punchdrunk show is similar – you’ll find rooms that you keep going back to, you’ll never see other rooms no matter how many times you go.  A sense of disorientation settles over you but you don’t mind – it is as though you are walking through a dream.  It is the most wonderful dream and you want to just let your feet take you where they will – it doesn’t matter if you don’t see everything.  To just experience the complete immersion in a waking dream is enough.  That is the feeling of a punchdrunk show and that is the scene my imagination created while reading this book.

Another connection is to Erick Setiawan’s marvelous and sadly under-known Of Bees and Mist.  Another story of a world quite like ours but more magical.  Even the writing has similarities, making the two books seems like they could conceivably exist in the same universe.  The Night Circus is more grounded in our world – specific references to locations, for one thing – but it is the tone… and something about that tone that makes it so special.  There’s an interesting digression (perhaps not the right word but close enough) at the end of the novel where two characters discuss the magic of words.  It’s a rather meta moment in many ways – we are reading a book after all – but strangely it doesn’t feel jarring in the way such meta-fictional moments often do.  It didn’t feel like Morgenstern was tooting her own horn or drawing attention to her own novel.  Instead, it felt… logical.  It was a reminder of what had come before and almost a call to action to go out and seek more of the same.  It discusses the power behind stories, behind words – the way that they can shape the future unlike anything else.  And it’s true: we use words on a daily basis to influence others in ways that nothing else can even approximate.  Stories can change the path of your life – they can save you, they can turn you around, they can remind you, they can kill you, they can do any and everything.  Because they are the closest thing we actually have to magic in this world.

Not technology but stories.  That’s where the magic lies.

And that’s what this book is really all about.  The Story itself is as important as the story.  You get wrapped up in it and by the end, all you want to do is go out and do something magical.  Fall in love, create something extraordinary, even just simply write words on a page or tell someone a tale.  And it’s marvelous.

The details surrounding the backstory are sketchy for most of the novel and only get vaguely revealed as it wraps up – and that was admittedly a little frustrating at times.  I wanted to understand why these two gentlemen had been pitting their ‘students’ against each other for so long and what it all meant.  I told you the denouement was a little disappointing?  Well, the revelation behind all of this was so simple and so… petty that it didn’t seem to make sense, really.  But just like it Of Bees and Mist, we have to accept that even the smartest and most talented and most rational people do irrational things when faced with emotion.  We’re not all Sherlock – hell, even Sherlock isn’t Sherlock.  The Hatfields and the McCoys keep fighting because, well, that’s what they do.  It defies logic and for that exact reason it cannot be explained to an outsider.  It simply is what must be.  And that’s the conflict in this novel.  Of course, the old men running the show are blind to the needs and emotions of the young living creatures they’re playing with.  When death comes into play – and love – it irrevocably changes the field in a way that they can’t understand.  Try to imagine it as though the pieces on the chessboard were all animate, alive.  That they all had stories of their own – and that when you took your opponent’s pawn, friends on both sides of the board would get upset.

The characters, though, are secondary to some extent: it all comes back to the circus.  My god, the circus.  I want to walk about in all black and white with a red scarf in the hopes that someone will say to me “are you…” and I will simply smile and we’ll discuss the adventures we’ve both had at the circus.  Because, again like a punchdrunk performance, you are irrevocably changed when you leave.  Some people hate it and that is that, nothing to be done.  But you’ll always know a punchdrunk fan, perhaps by the mask they have hanging on their wall or the way a certain song will make their ears prick up.  Hell, the prelude from Vertigo is included on Doubleday’s absolutely fucking brilliant Spotify playlist (if you have Spotify, check it out here) and it made me flash back to wandering about the McKittrick even as I read about wandering through the circus.  Layers upon layers….

Rating: 5+ out of 5.  You may ask why I don’t give it a 6.  It’s hard to explain – I don’t entirely know, to be honest.  But what I do know is this: as I finished the novel (to the sounds of Florence Welch belting out a story of cosmic love and the creeping strains of an ambient Moby track), I didn’t want to let it go.  I didn’t want to close the book because I didn’t want to leave that world.  There’s a difference between this type of story and the stories that become 6s, I suppose.  These books are perhaps more important than those, even if the impact is hypothetically less.  See, the impact of these novels cannot be measured in the same way.  A novel like Goon Squad hit me because it was time and place and meaning all wrapped up into a single cherishable moment that I can forever call upon.  Whereas this book exists outside of time, outside of moment, outside of place.  The only thing that exists concretely is the meaning.  The magic.  The sheer knock-you-down, take-your-breath-away, was-it-a-dream-and-can-I-go-back wonder of it.  And this book… this book has it in spades.  It is a remarkable debut – even moreso because it would be remarkable for anyone’s book at any time.  It is magic.  Seek it out with all speed – you won’t regret it.

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Jan 07 2012
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Fiction, Literature

Life: A User’s Manual

The Short Version: A panoramic look at the residents of a single apartment building in Paris, at a very specific moment.  Of course, their lives and backstories and the stories of the building and the stories of people/things only barely tangentially related are also told, building up to a singular event at just before 8pm on June 23, 1975.

The Review: Before I begin, I must address a few interesting coincidences about the circumstances behind my finally reading/finishing this novel.  Firstly, the last book I read (Last Man in Tower - read it) was also about a block of flats.  It was a different story, of course – but we still got to know the residents of each apartment and how they interacted with each other and their lives were all woven together as a supporting tapestry around the main story.  This book does not have a main story, I’d argue (the closest it gets is Bartlebooth’s or perhaps Valene’s concept), but the general structure is similar: we get to know the residents of each apartment.

Secondly, I just saw an Under The Radar 2012 show by a collective called Gob Squad entitled “Super Night Shot” (also: see it).  Four members of the group rush onto the street an hour before the show and shoot a film which is then mixed live in front of the audience.  For various reasons, I happened to be inside the theater already for the final moment of the film (for me, it was the first moment of the show, I suppose – talk about meta…), where Bastian said something like (I wish I remembered the exact quote!): “without the banal, nothing would be incredible.”  So it’s interesting that I’ve spent my morning looking at so much banality that was, up to this point, annoying the hell out of me.

Full disclosure: had this book not been for BookClub, I may well’ve stopped reading it.  It bothered me to almost the same extent as Tristram Shandy - I simply did not care to keep reading it.  I felt, with each page, that I was mostly wasting my time.  I could’ve been reading something that was, put simply, more interesting.  I’m not one who necessarily needs a gripping plot – quite often, well-written stories without much plot are just as engaging as ones loaded with twists and turns (see: Richard Nelson’s Apple Family plays).  The problem is, there was no plot here.  In fact, I’ve been debating with myself about whether this can properly be considered a novel.  It is certainly fiction but I’m almost more willing to call it a fictional biography.  A fictional journalistic exercise.  It is not, to my mind, a novel – because there is no driving action.  This gets me into hot water though because some of the more experimental novels I’ve read in my time are just that: novels.  This, despite not having an obvious plot or anything like that.  Still, I’m pretty sure that I can now say I’m not a fan of experimental fiction, seeing as my previous attempts (read all about them here, here, here, and here) have all met with – at the very best – detached admiration and mostly quiet bewilderment… or even outright loathing.

But there’s a redeeming feature to this novel and that is, interestingly enough, the writing.  Perec is obviously an excellent writer and this is a masterful translation.  Some of the individual stories are fantastic.  Were they to be taken without this strange self-imposed framework, they would make an excellent short-story novel.  And yet… this framework.  From the preamble and from what I’ve read about the book, it’s clear that Perec wanted to create a sort of literary jigsaw puzzle in which the pieces slowly but surely came together and despite wrong turns or incorrect assumptions, you’d eventually see the whole picture revealed.  And in the last chapter, as he describes everything that you’ve seen in a succinct dozen or so paragraphs, you do see the whole picture: it is this marvelous apartment block and all of the lives going on in that specific moment.  But the problem is, I never felt like I was actually engaged in solving a puzzle.  I never felt like the pieces meant anything.  This is mostly because I didn’t care about a single character.  Despite all of the background given, none of them were all that engaging to me on anything more than a superfluous level.

This may have to do with the obsessive listing of every fucking thing that appears in any room in any of these apartments.  My god, I will never look at any list the same way ever again.  I would conservatively estimate that a full quarter of this book’s page count is given over to lists.  Of objects. Or descriptions of said objects.  There is nothing more alienating to a reader than flipping the page to simply see item, item, item, item, item, item, item, item, item, item, item, item, item, item, item, item, item, item, item, item, item, item, item, item, item, item, item, item, item, item, item, item, item, item, item, item, item, item, item, item, item, item, item, item, item, item, item, item, item, item, item, item, etc.  That was the moment where the book turned from a somewhat annoying experience to a truly aggravating one.  I found myself skimming the lists… and then starting to skim stories that I didn’t find interesting.  It became rather like reading a magazine instead of a book: I might start a story (an article) and, finding that it didn’t interest me, skim the rest and move onto the next one.  I do not feel as though I missed anything, though!  I should feel as though I’ve done a bad thing and not given the book my full attention.  But I don’t – because it did not deserve my full attention, it deserved the minimal amount of my attention.  ”Does that adequately answer your condescending question?” is not quite the level of vitriol I built up for the book – I did, in fact, enjoy many moments… but mostly I felt like my time was wasted.

Rating: 2 out of 5.  This is the tough part.  The writing is so wonderful that when it worked for me, it really worked.  The story of the burgling aristos, the story of Bartlebooth, the story of the man who hunted down his baby’s nursemaid and accidental murderer… those stories (and others) were terrific.  I loved them.  But then, this marvelous tool of literary creation is turned to acts of unspeakable banality, which only annoyed me.  And while I know that I can only acknowledge the incredible because of the banal… I don’t read to experience the banal.  I read to escape it.  I read to escape ‘reality’ or, in the case of non-fiction, to better educate myself about it by exposure to something Important.  I do not read to experience the average mundanities.  I lead a relatively exciting life and I still have my fill of the mundane.  I would much rather my books provide my imagination some stimulation – this book saw my imagination sprint off in the other direction.

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