52 in 09 Recap

1. Pale Fire – “a constant reminder of just how stimulating and delightful reading a book can be.”
2. Lolita – “this is art at the highest level, a deeply felt affirmation of all the things literature can do best, a book which features jaw dropping prose, a singular and precious cultural artifact produced by a master craftsman working at the peak of his abilities.”
3. 2666 – “2666 can’t always make up for its failings. But goddamn do I appreciate the effort.

Home

Home is the American cousin to Jane Gardam’s Old Filth. Both are low-key stories of regular people living their normal lives, with most of their excitement in the past tense. History is alluded to constantly, but never fully exposed, always flickering on the periphery of the story. The pleasures are as similar as the tone and feel: very fine, unpretentious writing, a healthy respect of the author towards her reader, and a pervasive quaintness that never makes you uncomfortable.  Of course every one of these virtues can become a sin — unpretentious writing can become plain, healthy respect disengagement, quaintness meekness — but Robinson’s craft strikes the right balance.

Pale Fire

Lolita‘s had a long lock on the top spot of my favorite books this year. Of course, competition’s sparse, since I’ve barely read anything in 2009, but a challenger has finally emerged. Fittingly it comes from the very same author, Vladimir Nabokov. Pale Fire does not resemble Lolita very much. Lolita is a classic first-person novel; Pale Fire is a metafictional mindfuck. Settings are similar, as are narrators (verbose sexual deviants of Euro extraction), but the greatest commonality is their excellence. Pale Fire is an altogether different kind of book — some might say it’s too clever, others might say its difficult to get into — but it’s still Nabokov’s, which means it draws from that deep well of spirit and has that same crystalline prose.

The Book of Basketball

Simmons is a writer of ephemera. His Page 2 on ESPN is a reliably entertaining time-killer, and his weekly picks keep me abreast of the NFL season. But the thing you most want to see when you visit is an NBA column. Bill Simmons knows basketball, and is the rare observer that sees things even a relatively hardcore fan (me) will miss. When he announced his candicacy for Minnesota Timberwolves GM, all his readers went, “Hahaha… hmm…” Frankly, it didn’t seem that ridiculous. Simmons, besides being a trade machine guru, seems to have a good handle on what a team needs to succeed.

With that in mind, I was excited by the recent release of his definitively named tome, The Book of Basketball. (A deep discount at Amazon didn’t hurt.) But after reading it, the title seems a rather ridiculous claim to authority. My suggestion: A Book of Basketball. Like Simmons’ web articles, it will keep your attention, but sometimes only barely. This is dispensable stuff, which is fine when you’re writing ephemera, but not when you’re writing a big book like this.

Climbers

Best known for his visionary Viriconium stories, as well as quantum sci-fi Light and Nova Swing, Climbers is M. John Harrison’s 1984 foray into the mundane. Considering his genre leanings, even his rendition of our world comes off as slightly skewed, strange in subtle but telling ways. For better or worse, Climbers is vintage Harrison, a style guide for his brilliant but sometimes mechanical prose.

Inner Workings

Inner Workings is a collection of criticism from Nobel Laureate — and personal favorite — J.M. Coetzee. Coetzee, whose fiction is pruned and never purple, demonstrates an able command of the critical essay, though his strengths are his argumentation and dizzying reading list rather than any natural compatibility with the form. His intimate knowledge of how fiction works and vast reading permits him to make keen insights, but it also makes him at times irritatingly confident in his judgments.

Beloved

I didn’t realize the debt Calvin Baker owed to Toni Morrison until I read Beloved. Baker wrote Dominion, a book I loved for its lush prose, boldness, and supernatural aura. Beloved has these same qualities, only in much greater quantities, and Morrison also evokes the almost surreal atrocities perpetrated on  blacks during Reconstruction in as convincing and horrifying a fashion as I’ve seen. I don’t know what you’ve heard about Beloved, but believe me when I tell you this is a horror story, ghosts and all. Of course it’s a horror story delivered by Toni Morrison, one of the grand dames of literature that I’m just discovering now, and in no way is her reputation overblown. Morrison’s Beloved is one of those touchstone books, the rare piece of capital L Literature, book club type book* that swings hard and at your gut.

The City and the City

A practitioner of urban fantasy (one of the few I’m familiar with, save M Harrison), China Miéville is most well known for his painstaking creation of Bas Lag, the setting of Perdido Street Station, a breakout hit in certain circles a few years back; The Scar, a nautical fantasy; and The Iron Council which… well, wasn’t that great. An avowed nerd with a penchant for bestiaries, Miéville’s imagination is easily his greatest asset, and any D&D influences have been strained through European folklore and his own well-honed sense of the horrific. Bas Lag is populated by cactus men, water-shaping fish people named the vodyanoi, and the Remade, unlucky felons whose bodies have been transformed for their crimes – for instance, a pickpocket might get his stealing hand replaced with a monstrous crab claw. Nothing is off limits in Bas Lag, and Miéville conjures it all with brio and commitment, which makes Bas Lag seem almost plausible, at times. It is always wondrous, though.

Besides his nerd credentials, Miéville is a Socialist (yes, they’re still around). His political involvement includes nonfiction one imagines is far drier than psychedelic Bas Lag. For instance, Wikipedia lists one of his nonfiction titles: Between Equal Rights: A Marxist Theory of International Law.

Though I’ve been aware of Miéville’s politics from the get-go, it never really colored his writing for me. Yes, I can recall a union strike of those vodyanoi I mentioned earlier, but the focus of his books always seemed to be the worlds themselves, less the political mechanisms responsible for controlling them. The City and the City reverses, and with it, Miéville has created a zeitgeist novel which reads almost as a repudiation of the earlier excesses.

It has all the earmarks of a China Miéville novel: grungy urban setting, wonderful names (Tyador Borlú of the Extreme Crimes Squad is our narrator, joining amazingly-monikered characters like Uther Doul of The Scar, and Isaac Dan der Grimnebulin of Perdido), and a linguist’s delight in wordplay. Miéville has a syntax all his own, and demands careful reading. But for all these superficial similarities with other works, make no mistake: The City and the City is a departure.

Set in two cities, well, actually one, named Besźel and Ul Qoma, The City and the City taps our modern-day border anxieties by creating a nightmare border situation: the two cities are literally on top of each other. Not physically, but existentially. Their realities have collided, so that one building may belong in Ul Qoma, and its neighbor in Besźel. Residents of each city are under no circumstance to acknowledge foreigners — though they might pass them in the street, they are still in another country, technically. So the natives have developed a technique called ‘unseeing,’ which is pretty much ignoring. (Miéville has devised a whole lexicon to manage this conceit, coining words like “grosstopically,” or, my favorite, “topolganger”.) If the citizens fail to unsee someone in the other country, they are subject to the shadowy enforcement group known only as Breach, wraith-like G-men tasked with ensuring that borders remain unbroken. This, if you’re familiar with Miéville, feels like one of his old tricks. His earlier books have all sorts of secret cabals like this, with magical powers.

But appearances are deceiving, and even with the rather amazing set-up, The City and the City is a strait-laced police procedural. The supernatural and mystical, favorite topics in Perdido Street Station, are routinely exploded by characters as falsehoods and fancy. While the eager reader waits for Miéville to finally pull back the curtain and dazzle with his new monsters, they never come. In fact, this denial of the fantastic  (again, apart from the idea of two cities whose realities overlap) is so categorical that it feels like Miéville having some fun with long-time fans. But let’s consider what Miéville is offering, rather than what he’s withholding.

The plot starts with a dead body, and unfolds like most such plots do. In fact, the two-thirds of the book could be the script for a Law & Order – albeit a weird one – maintaining that rhythm of clue, impasse, breakthrough, etc. etc. I’ve read plenty of whodunits, but it’s been awhile, and I chafed at the pacing. You know the case has to be cracked at a reasonable pace, so some pages are spent investigating red herrings and dead ends. This would be fine if we were learning something about our protagonist along the way, but Borlú is little more than a pair of eyes to take us through the crime scene and the cities. He’s standard issue literary detective – perceptive, dogged, dedicated – and the reader never gets so much as a sniff of his backstory.

This isn’t an oversight on Miéville’s part, however. Borlú is simply not the main character. That distinction is split between the titular cities, Besźel and Ul Qoma, and Miéville is working out some ideas on urban space and the meaning of borders, here. Thankfully it’s interesting stuff, as Miéville always reinforces his whimsy with a rigorous intellect, exploring the ramifications of such a situation to a very satisfactory degree.

Unfortunately, this realism comes at a cost. Suspension of disbelief is a challenge for any fantasist, which made his success with Perdido such a surprise. Suspending the reader’s disbelief for that story is a lot like getting a lead balloon to fly, and high, too. I mean, do you remember how I said there’s cactus people in it? Like, final fantasy cactus people. Anyway, The City and the City can’t rely on Bas Lag’s cheerful incoherency, because Miéville is determined to root it in a recognizable reality. Characters Google search, Amazon search, talk about Coke, etc. Yet he doesn’t go all the way. Ul Qoma/Besźel, for instance, are vaguely in Eastern Europe, but we don’t know quite where. Their histories are hinted at, but never explored. And Breach, quite frankly, don’t work. They appear instantaneously after a border violation has occurred, and yet they have no occult powers – just a surveillance network? No way. And that single No way is all it takes for the seams to start showing.

But seams or no, Miéville has a compelling backdrop here, and once things go off the rails in the third part, the book begins to breathe a little. The typical whodunit formula is ditched for a more madcap, more dangerous final act, and no longer is Borlú muddling through the case because Miéville needs to fill another fifteen pages before it can break: he’s out there and active. The excitement and drive of this passage is not a particular surprise – Miéville can do thrilling, but it does come as a welcome change of pace to the earlier sections.

Chucking the whodunit formula does mean you lose the wonderfully neat conclusions that genre is so famous for. I imagine The City and the City’s will strike each reader differently, but I found it dissatisfying, for spoilery reasons I don’t recommend you read until you’ve read the book.*

The City and the City definitely represents a new direction for Miéville, but I’m not sure if it’s a good one.  The book has a great high concept, but bobbles the execution, while the opposite is true for Perdido and The Scar. Perdido, for instance, was a simple monster book, but it was made great by the thousand bits of weirdness Miéville crammed the pages with, little filips which made the world so vivid. The City and the City lacks that character, which means even together, Ul Qoma and Besźel can’t stack up to New Crobuzon.

* Spoilers to follow:

Okay: so Borlú joins Breach. Why? Breach is an illegal outfit, operating on their whims, beholden to nobody but an Oversight Committee (who mostly say please Breach and thank you Breach). The Scariest moment of the book is when Borlú wakes up in Breach’s clutches and he realizes: there is no appeal here. No code of conduct they must obey, no laws they acknowledge but their own. With torture being the hot topic it is, Miéville is reproducing the horror one must feel when they realize that there’s nobody in the room but them and their interrogator, and the interrogator makes the rules. Yet Borlú warms up to Breach very quickly, and I’m not sure why. The power it offers him is good, sure, but Borlú’s big climactic moment of self-actualization (and total display of badassery) is when Ashil fails to impress the bad guys with his status as Breach. Borlú says: “I’m not Breach… I am Inspector Tyador Borlú. Besźel Extreme Crimes Squad. I’m not here for Breach… I represent the Besźel policzai, to enforce Besź law. Because you broke it.”

Forty pages later, he’s saying, Ah, fuck it, I’ll suit up for Breach. Worse still, I can’t even argue the character development that much, because Miéville never really gives us Borlú’s motivation. We don’t know why he’s a detective, why he chose this life.

All Our Yesterdays

With all apologies to my English teacher, who expected me to finish this, oh, in April. All Our Yesterdays has a hot pink cover that draws some looks, but it’s not the chick lit it might appear. It is a classic saga novel, detailing the struggles of an Italian family through WWII. Yes, another world war novel. I’ve read enough of these by now that their themes and plots are beginning to blur together. In fact, All Our Yesterdays travels some of the same terrain Umberto Eco deals with in The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana. But Natalia Ginzburg’s book takes a fresh tack. Other war novels are consumed by the war: look at the characters of Catch-22 and Gravity’s Rainbow, whose entire existences are warped by the conflict. All Our Yesterdays is surprisingly indifferent to the battles and politics of the war, and Ginzburg uses it as a backdrop for family drama. The war is ubiquitous, but always somewhere in the distance, happening in other places to other people. For the family she tracks, the war is something which shortens the supply of lemons and necessitates dull vacations in the country. These people are peripheral to the war, and that’s true both ways: for them the war is peripheral.

Which means we have a book about a family, related by an omniscient and intrusive narrator that comments on the action with the irony and interest of the family’s black sheep, never really embraced into the fold, say a distant cousin. Ginzburg’s style echoes Jose Saramago’s, in that you won’t find many paragraphs or quotations marks. But while Saramago still includes dialogue, Ginzburg glosses over conversations, telling the reader what this character said without giving the actual speech. Telling is about all Ginzburg does, and, predictably, this is both the novel’s greatest strength and weakness.

The expository style lets her cover a ton of ground and family history, spanning months in a sentence, dispatching characters with a clause. With such a large ensemble to work with, it is convenient for the reader to be simply told what various characters are feeling, because there is not time to delve into each one’s psychology.

But the risk with telling is, as always, that the reader won’t like the voice. Characters can be disliked, and that’s often a good thing, but the character of the narrator is the medium for the story, and if this narrator is tedious or off-putting, even a great story can suffer. And Ginzburg’s narration can stray into tedium, though this is may have something to do with the banality of the action. After all, our characters are non-combatants, country folk living in an out of the way village called San Costanzo, and their lives are not that exciting. But this is forgivable, since 1) not every book has to have gory action; and 2) it allows the novel’s best trick (which I’ll get to in a second). The far graver sin is the narration’s heavy-handedness. You feel like your impressions are being directed and shaped, something readers balk at. This is a weird phenomenon. We’re happy to accept the narration of less intrusive narrators which make no judgments and present unbiased details, perhaps because we feel like we’re experiencing it first-hand, but of course these unbiased details are painstakingly fabricated by the author to engender this or that effect. Same goes for suspension of disbelief: readers are obsessed with plausibility, and just one tiny stray detail can make a reader say “Hold on, this would never happen,” when of course none of this would ever happen. The common element seems to be that readers love being manipulated – they just hate when they know it’s happening.

You’re certainly aware of it in All Our Yesterdays, as the narrator sits in oftentimes scathing judgment of the characters, berating them for their weakness or complaints. The reader gets indignant, sometimes, defensive on behalf of characters they haven’t been allowed to form their own impressions of because the domineering narration does not permit it.

Yet the narrative voice is self-assured and frequently picks up the slack when the plot lags, which is so important with a book like this. For much of its duration, the book is almost stubbornly everyday. Characters get sick, have affairs, have kids, etc.: the basic drama of existence. It’s a sometimes frustrating act of denial on Ginzburg’s part, as the reader longs to follow one of the characters who march into battle, while she makes sure the reader stays firmly put in the sleepy backwater of San Costanzo. I found it so frustrating that, in the midst of my semester, I kind of… stopped reading it, so that by the time I returned I had to relearn the cast (and honestly couldn’t figure out who everybody was again by the end). That speaks to my faults as a reader more than anything, though, because like I said: it lets Ginzburg pull a really good trick.

The war is always at the margins of the book. Its presence is acknowledged, the chill of its shadow felt, but war, real war, never seems to penetrate the world of the characters. Except then it does, all of a sudden, and it’s just as alienating and upsetting as war must be in real life.  The novel’s best thread comes late, as a Nazi occupier invades the home of protagonist Cenzo Rena when he accidentally runs the Italian’s dog over with his motorbike. (Sidebar: Dead dogs are always a sign things are about to take a turn for the worse. In another book I actually read for class All Our Yesterdays was for, The Darling, the narrator says “When is it time to flee your country? ‘When they shoot your dogs,’ is what people say.”)  The Nazi is a younger man who seems genuinely remorseful over the accident. Cenzo treats him cordially, and the Nazi takes this as a signal to impose himself on the family. He begins dropping by, bearing gifts of cigarettes and dull stories about his life before the war, in which he was a waiter. If you read the book, notice how Ginzburg begins to identify the young man as ‘the waiter’ rather than ‘the Nazi.’

The unsuspecting reader thinks this is one more example of Ginzburg’s steadfast refusal of thrills. Even the Nazis are kind of boring, fer crissakes. Cenzo Rena’s housekeeper is lulled as well, and takes a shine to the polite waiter. So much that one day, when Cenzo is out, the housekeeper laughs to the waiter about how she doesn’t understand why people are scared of him, how he’s really not a bad sort. She goes so far as to mention that a Jew who lives in the home of Cenzo Rena always hides in the cellar when the waiter comes over. At which point the waiter stops being the waiter, becomes the Nazi again, and in the book’s most chilling moment, asks: And was the Jew, for instance, in the cellar now?

Things go bad after that. For a WW2 novel that isn’t really about the war most of the time, All Our Yesterdays can bring home the horror of war with devastating poignancy. But only if you let it.

The Poems of T.S. Eliot

I’m taking two poetry courses this semester, and I’m currently working on a project that requires me to write poetry, something I’ve never done before, so I figured I would start educating myself. T.S. Eliot seemed a natural starting point.

Let me say this: I don’t get it. My hope is that I will look back at this post sometime in December and laugh at how naive and narrow-minded I was. For right now, I can only say that some parts connected with me, and some didn’t. I rolled my eyes at pretentious use of foreign languages, got sick of flipping to the explanatory notes to learn that this was a reference to some Greek myth, and found many of the poems opaque.

On the other hand, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock has an amazing flow (I urge you to listen to Eliot read this poem. Hilarious voice — this guy was born in St. Louis, by the way.), and The Wasteland is electric. I’m trying to figure out the music of language, and beginning to understand that the right word isn’t always the apt one, but sometimes the one that just sounds right.

Other than that, not much to report. Though the dude was obviously an anti-Semite.