Reading Challenge 2013: My Top Ten
Ooh, the excitement is overwhelming... What has made my top ten of the year? Let's start with...
10) A House for Mr Biswas – V S Naipaul
So we start the top ten with a book whose spot here was actually quite a surprise for me. This was my third of Naipaul’s substantial oeuvre, and I’ve gotten a pretty good idea that he always writes about roughly the same things: people in former colonies trying to make a place (and a life) for themselves in a post-colonial world; split identities, and so forth.
The reason I think this book finds itself in my top 10 is less to do with any particular love I had for it, and more to do with the fact that there’s really nothing bad I can say about it.
Although it treads similar ground to the other Naipaul books I’ve read, it does so more comprehensively (it helps that this is five times the length of the others I've read), with more narrative direction and a lot more pathos.
We’re told very early on in the book that the eponymous Mr Biswas will build himself a house before his story comes to an end, and he will live in that house for a few weeks (or months, I forget which) before he dies. That poignant prolepsis foreshadows all that comes after, as Mr Biswas deals with the frustrations of work, money, familial obligations and multiple disasters, trying to find himself a place to call his own and forge out a life for himself, rather than one dictated on someone else's terms. All the time though we know that eventually he will realise that dream of a place of his own.
It’s also a deeply personal tale I feel, what with Naipaul himself being an Indian brought up in Trinidad like Mr Biswas, and I feel it explores, in a quite cynical yet very humane way, the full tale of postcolonial existentialism. It moreover was a very unobtrusive read, and one that was strangely uplifting.
9) Pale Fire – Vladimir Nabokov
Well, we’ve reached almost the last of TIME’s two-book authors – Pynchon made my top ten twice last year, Phillip Roth made both years’ top 20 and Saul Bellow was a bit all over the place – but Nabokov I think has to take the prize for the greatest disparity between books. As I explained in last year’s countdown, I hated Lolita for practically every reason, which may have stood Pale Fire in decent stead, given that my expectations were so low going in. It helps that it’s such a completely different book.
An odd literary experiment in many ways, Pale Fire somehow falls under the definition of a ‘novel’ despite the fact that it consists of three parts: one, an introduction to a fictional poem, written by a fictional friend of the fictional poet; two, the fictional poem Pale Fire itself; and three, the afore-mentioned friend’s explanatory notes and glosses to the poem itself.
*minor spoiler alert* Somehow in all of the envelope-pushing layers of meaning and reality, Nabokov manages to spin a captivating tale about an Eastern-European king hiding out in the USA from a network of revolutionary assassins, and the poet he befriends who agrees to ‘tell his story’.
I say ‘somehow’ but the truth is the experiment is not always successful, as the ‘notes’ section increasingly loses its verisimilitude and becomes more a sequence of unrelated narrations by the fictional poet’s friend. I don’t think there’s really any other way that Nabokov could wrap it all up within the structure, but it does become quite self-conscious as the notes-writer repeatedly drops the pretense that he’s writing about the poem and starts overtly writing about himself instead.
But what makes Pale Fire work is for how long that pretense is kept up, and in spite of the very academic structure, keeps you reading. It’s a really profound achievement, as well as a book of singular intrigue.
8) Housekeeping – Marilynne Robinson
In a similar vein to Pale Fire, I went into Housekeeping with fairly low expectations, with me not being a particular fan of Robinson’s more recent works Home or Gilead.
And while this does verge on similar territory of home and family in small-town America, it is a far more moving and rewarding experience, to me at least.
I mentioned a while ago, when discussing Elizabeth Bowen’s The Death of the Heart that there was a book that dealt much better with themes of coming-of-age and finding-your-place, and this is it. The strange relationship between Ruth and her vagrant, quite distant aunt Sylvie is at first one that seems to be heading towards disaster and discord, but gradually evolves to a bizarre yet deeply satisfying understanding.
Meanwhile, Ruth’s sister Lucille takes on the voice of ‘reason’, one might say, or at least ‘normalcy’ as she sees her sister stepping more and more completely through the looking-glass of social deviance and isolation. Lucille seems to take on the role of conventional femininity, and remains a sympathetic and endearing character even while our narrator finds she can no longer be dictated to on such terms and becomes more and more estranged from civilisation.
This book is at once heartbreaking and uplifting. As I hinted at while discussing Bowen, Housekeeping manages to explore issues of societal expectations on a young, malleable personality, but keeps its conclusion both compassionate and bittersweet, with a very optimistic sense of redemption.
7) Deliverance – James Dickey
Explanatory note, first: for those who don’t know how my brother’s sorting program works, basically it presents you with a series of “A vs B” choices where you have to pick the (in this case, book) that you like better than the other, and then sorts the list based on all your preferences. The reason I’m explaining this is because the hardest choice I got in the whole process of sorting this list was this, Deliverance, vs the previous book, Housekeeping. I sat there feeling myself leaning one way, then the other before finally coming down on this side of the fence.
The reason I hesitated so long over the choice was that, although they are pretty much polar opposites in every way, the more I thought about it the more it became clear that Housekeeping could be read as a book about 'femininity' and what’s expected from a young lady, while Deliverance is a book about 'masculinity' and what’s expected from a young man. The more I pondered that two-sided coin the more difficult my choice became until, eventually, I guess I chose the one that I can more obviously relate to. But, for the record, on another day, these two books could easily be in reverse order.
So this book, already. Notch up another run on the ‘I saw the film adaptation first’ with this one, and I think this is really the first one I’m doing (there are more, on this very post) where the book managed to surprise me in a big way, particularly vis-à-vis my enjoyment of reading it. I went in, as would practically anyone having seen the film first, with little more than duelling banjos and the unfortunately synonymous ‘squeal piggy, squeal’ line running through my head.
What Deliverance the book delivers, though, is the same thrill-ride of the film but also a fascinating, Heart of Darkness-esque fable about man’s incessant desire to overcome the elements, and the inevitable and tragic consequences when men find themselves (literally and figuratively) in over their heads.
There is a really beautiful fatalism to this story, taking on many dark overtones as we are reminded throughout that the four guys on this traumatising journey beyond the civilised world are just ordinary guys working office jobs day-to-day. As their baser and more animalistic instincts are brought to the fore, the darker side of humanity is revealed.
Deliverance is a really powerful work, and deserving of far more recognition than simply being the source material for the line “squeal piggy, squeal” which, by the way, isn’t even in the book. Knowing that James Dickey also wrote the screen adaptation, I’d say it was either a misstep on his part to add that bit, or possibly an actor improvisation. Either way, the book has a great deal more depth and intrigue than the film, and in particular the mythology around the film, might have you believe.
6) A Handful of Dust – Evelyn Waugh
So, as indicated by my italicised ‘almost’ in the introduction to Pale Fire earlier in this post, we weren’t yet at the end of TIME’s two-book authors. But Evelyn Waugh makes himself not only the final contender for that title but also one of the highest aggregate scorers of that esteemed company (outside of the obvious winner Mr Pynchon).
So while Brideshead Revisited made my top twenty last year for its graceful, nostalgic and melancholic rendering of a grander England between the wars, A Handful of Dust cracks my top ten this year for its delightfully acidic satire of the very same society that Brideshead seemed to revere.
As I said when discussing Brideshead, it seems apparent to me that Stephen Fry owes more of his mannerisms and language to Waugh than to Oscar Wilde (whom I’d always just presumed to be his greatest influence), and the Waugh that I read in A Handful of Dust is the absolute best in terms of that searing British wit, and that irreverence for British manners and an outdated class system.
I could describe the plot of this book basically as ‘rich people behaving badly’, although the reason it works so well here is that it adheres so closely to the societal norms that we see so often in more serious dramatic works, just stretched slightly beyond logic into the absurd. So we recognise everything we are reading as perfectly acceptable in the society of the time, yet see it in a fresh new light that makes me wonder why it couldn’t, in fact, be possible.
The ending of this book, though, is definitely a funny one. There was a moment or two where I really questioned where Waugh was taking this. While the final chapter maintains its satirical examination of the upper classes, it can't be denied I felt like it was straying too far, for a while. By the end, though, it became clear the satire is not just on the society but also the literature around that society; I was smiling and enjoying the almost dada-esque comedic elements again, and Waugh had most certainly won me over to his way of seeing things.
5) Native Son – Richard Wright
OK, so… I believe at the very start of this countdown, or rather when I was discussing my bottom-ranked An American Tragedy, I mentioned that this book was coming later in the list. Four-and-a-half posts later and here it is.
For some reason I’d read most of the ‘plight of black people in society’ books last year, and as far as I can tell, this was the only one remaining for me this year to read. But holy cow, what a book to finish on.
Native Son starts out innocuously enough: we have a young underprivileged black youth, with an unfortunate home situation and a similarly unfortunate proneness to aggression, who goes to work as a driver for a wealthy white family who are proud of their history of helping those less fortunate.
The sudden turn that this story takes is one that I can’t really discuss without spoiling the plot, but suffice to say it happens so suddenly, and with such heart-thumping impact that it made me (Bec can maybe attest to this) sit up in bed while I was reading and just shake my head.
From that initial turn, the book covers all sorts of territory, including a Dostoyevskian morality tale, a chase thriller and finally a legal courtroom drama. In its final phase it basically takes on the guise of a longform essay, unmasking the genuine plight of underprivileged black youth and exposing wherein the real guilt and shame should lie.
I learned while listening to Studio 360’s excellent ‘American Icons’ piece on Native Son that Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (my number four book of last year, you will recall) was written as a sort of reaction to this: a similarly angry, but somehow less morally ambivalent and confrontational piece exposing the same furious injustices. I’m not going to give myself a Sophie’s choice of favouring one or the other, though, because both books are absolutely supreme renditions of a marginalised people ‘acting out’. Invisible Man’s strength is in its subtlety, though, while Native Son’s is in the complete opposite.
4) I, Claudius – Robert Graves
This book was a real revelation to me, although there’s no reason it should have been. Given my love of medieval Icelandic sagas it should have stood to reason that a semi-fictionalised account of a tumultuous and fascinating period of history would definitely float my boat. But having never really developed an interest in Roman – or any ancient – history, it didn’t occur to me how well this fell into my wheelhouse.
Besides the style being one that I’m pretty comfortable with, what made Graves’ narrative come to life so much was what memorable characters he made of the historical figures. I mean, obviously he didn’t need much help with Caligula (basically one can just go "here's Caligula and some shit he did" and everyone's all like "Whoooa, are you kidding? What a ridiculously absurd character"), but the character of Livia in particular is one of the most delightfully malevolent, scheming characters – smart, cunning, all-powerful. While there was obviously political intrigue going on around Tiberius and Germanicus, it was Livia that kept me reading and kept me spellbound throughout this book.
What also makes the book perhaps more interesting than I’d expected was the position of Claudius as the narrator. Being thought of as a simple idiot, his family’s negligence and ignorance of his own intellect leaves him virtually unnoticed as he retells the goings-on in the corridors of power – he has no need to safeguard his own ambitions, but just watches events unfold from the fringes. This serves to give the reader the impression of unprecedented and intimate access, and oddly becomes an interesting parallel with the next book in my countdown.
I guess there’s nothing really more to say about I, Claudius: it’s simply a book that really fascinated and really entertained me.
3) One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – Ken Kesey
I haven’t been keeping score with the ‘I saw the film adaptation first’ tally, but I imagine we’re up to about five or six now – could this be the highest-ranked as well?
Firstly, I’ve always loved the movie of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, so it was with a little trepidation, or at least, anticipated tedium, that I approached this book earlier in the year. It took me about a paragraph for those fears to dissipate, since what Kesey presents in this book is a radically different story to what Milos Forman delivered in the adaptation.
As mentioned in the previous discussion, there’s an interesting parallel with I, Claudius here, in that both books are narrated by silent observers, whose presumed stupidity leads to unfettered access to the internal goings-on. In the case of this book, our narrator is the big, silent ‘chief’ Bromden.
This fact seems remarkable, coming from the film first, since Bromden is such a side – albeit omnipresent – character in the film. But like the filmmakers behind To Kill a Mockingbird changed it from being Scout’s story to being all about Atticus, so too did the filmmakers behind Cuckoo’s Nest remove the Chief’s narratorial status and made it all about McMurphy.
McMurphy is still the hero here, but he is the hero of a very different story. Kesey was very concerned – obsessed, even, by the sounds of things – by the plight of the Native American, and the Chief as our protagonist here is a victim of that marginalisation, feeling always estranged from his home, his family and his heritage, to the point where he tends to hide inside himself – a place free from what he calls ‘the fog’.
The fog is a very powerful image which the film dispensed with, standing essentially for the chaotic and intimidating maelstrom of modern civilisation, but at the same time growing thickest when the chief wants to retreat, so in a sense he finds himself then surrounded by it. But it's something I’m sure most of us have wanted to retreat from at one stage or another, and more than anything else the Chief just wants to be free. All of these themes were more or less retained in the film, but Kesey’s impassioned narration reveals them in their most raw and powerful beauty.
I’m not meaning to downplay the film: for one thing the film gives us a most memorable scene (And one of my all-time favourite film moments) in the ‘juicy fruit’ sequence where the Chief reveals to McMurphy for the first time that he can hear everything said to him, and can speak back as well. In the book there’s a similar scene but it’s less an enormous revelation (to us, obviously) and more about McMurphy confirming for himself what he already suspected.
So, unlike Atonement, I actually think watching the film first is a good way to go about this one. The book adds so much more texture and meaning to the dramatic caper of the film, while going in reverse order I think would just anger me, and I’d more likely see it as a desecration of a beautiful book.
2) The Painted Bird – Jerzy Kosinsky
Now I have to admit off the bat that, while I knew this book would be pretty high on my list, I didn’t anticipate it peaking at number two. It certainly doesn’t disappoint me, but the episodic structure of this book bears a striking resemblance to similar works that I’ve ultimately disliked, or certainly at least not liked enough to consider the second-best read I’ve had in a year.
Kosinsky, for those playing along at home, was best known for me as the writer behind the absolutely brilliant 1979 Peter Sellers vehicle Being There (and the novel from which he adapted it himself, although I haven’t read that), so I may have gone into this book with slightly mistaken notions of what I was in for – light-hearted comedy? Possibly with a dark edge? Errrm… no.
From the moment I read a farmer gouging out the eye of a farmhand with a spoon at the dinner table, I knew I was in for a harrowing time. And I wasn’t wrong, because immediately afterwards, the other eye follows.
This is just the beginning of, as I said, an episodic journey through a war-torn landscape that both is and isn’t Russia, and a tangle of diversely unpleasant, cruel, frightened and misguided characters. Our guide through the journey is a young boy whose dark features allow everyone he meets to paint him instantly as a gypsy come to curse their lot in life. This unfortunate physical difference is drawn out by the narrator in the analogy of the painted bird, where one brown bird is painted with bright rainbow colours and sent back instinctively to his flock, who of course immediately tear him to pieces, thinking him an outsider while the painted bird remains unknowing of the reasons for the sudden attack.
Although this book is above all harrowing, it is also a deeply moving fable about war and the hatred that can be kindled between people when the world stops making sense. Every page of this book is compelling, and contains a multitude of new, uncomfortable surprises with a ring of truth.
Would I recommend this book? Probably not, to most people. But it remains one of the more haunting and captivating reads I’ve ever experienced.
And with that, we are down to that big revealing moment… Have you done the checklist? Do you know what’s coming? Well, anyway, here is my traditional GIF of Barrack Obama laughing to increase the suspense:
10) A House for Mr Biswas – V S Naipaul
So we start the top ten with a book whose spot here was actually quite a surprise for me. This was my third of Naipaul’s substantial oeuvre, and I’ve gotten a pretty good idea that he always writes about roughly the same things: people in former colonies trying to make a place (and a life) for themselves in a post-colonial world; split identities, and so forth.
The reason I think this book finds itself in my top 10 is less to do with any particular love I had for it, and more to do with the fact that there’s really nothing bad I can say about it.
Although it treads similar ground to the other Naipaul books I’ve read, it does so more comprehensively (it helps that this is five times the length of the others I've read), with more narrative direction and a lot more pathos.
We’re told very early on in the book that the eponymous Mr Biswas will build himself a house before his story comes to an end, and he will live in that house for a few weeks (or months, I forget which) before he dies. That poignant prolepsis foreshadows all that comes after, as Mr Biswas deals with the frustrations of work, money, familial obligations and multiple disasters, trying to find himself a place to call his own and forge out a life for himself, rather than one dictated on someone else's terms. All the time though we know that eventually he will realise that dream of a place of his own.
It’s also a deeply personal tale I feel, what with Naipaul himself being an Indian brought up in Trinidad like Mr Biswas, and I feel it explores, in a quite cynical yet very humane way, the full tale of postcolonial existentialism. It moreover was a very unobtrusive read, and one that was strangely uplifting.
9) Pale Fire – Vladimir Nabokov
Well, we’ve reached almost the last of TIME’s two-book authors – Pynchon made my top ten twice last year, Phillip Roth made both years’ top 20 and Saul Bellow was a bit all over the place – but Nabokov I think has to take the prize for the greatest disparity between books. As I explained in last year’s countdown, I hated Lolita for practically every reason, which may have stood Pale Fire in decent stead, given that my expectations were so low going in. It helps that it’s such a completely different book.
An odd literary experiment in many ways, Pale Fire somehow falls under the definition of a ‘novel’ despite the fact that it consists of three parts: one, an introduction to a fictional poem, written by a fictional friend of the fictional poet; two, the fictional poem Pale Fire itself; and three, the afore-mentioned friend’s explanatory notes and glosses to the poem itself.
*minor spoiler alert* Somehow in all of the envelope-pushing layers of meaning and reality, Nabokov manages to spin a captivating tale about an Eastern-European king hiding out in the USA from a network of revolutionary assassins, and the poet he befriends who agrees to ‘tell his story’.
I say ‘somehow’ but the truth is the experiment is not always successful, as the ‘notes’ section increasingly loses its verisimilitude and becomes more a sequence of unrelated narrations by the fictional poet’s friend. I don’t think there’s really any other way that Nabokov could wrap it all up within the structure, but it does become quite self-conscious as the notes-writer repeatedly drops the pretense that he’s writing about the poem and starts overtly writing about himself instead.
But what makes Pale Fire work is for how long that pretense is kept up, and in spite of the very academic structure, keeps you reading. It’s a really profound achievement, as well as a book of singular intrigue.
8) Housekeeping – Marilynne Robinson
In a similar vein to Pale Fire, I went into Housekeeping with fairly low expectations, with me not being a particular fan of Robinson’s more recent works Home or Gilead.
And while this does verge on similar territory of home and family in small-town America, it is a far more moving and rewarding experience, to me at least.
I mentioned a while ago, when discussing Elizabeth Bowen’s The Death of the Heart that there was a book that dealt much better with themes of coming-of-age and finding-your-place, and this is it. The strange relationship between Ruth and her vagrant, quite distant aunt Sylvie is at first one that seems to be heading towards disaster and discord, but gradually evolves to a bizarre yet deeply satisfying understanding.
Meanwhile, Ruth’s sister Lucille takes on the voice of ‘reason’, one might say, or at least ‘normalcy’ as she sees her sister stepping more and more completely through the looking-glass of social deviance and isolation. Lucille seems to take on the role of conventional femininity, and remains a sympathetic and endearing character even while our narrator finds she can no longer be dictated to on such terms and becomes more and more estranged from civilisation.
This book is at once heartbreaking and uplifting. As I hinted at while discussing Bowen, Housekeeping manages to explore issues of societal expectations on a young, malleable personality, but keeps its conclusion both compassionate and bittersweet, with a very optimistic sense of redemption.
7) Deliverance – James Dickey
Explanatory note, first: for those who don’t know how my brother’s sorting program works, basically it presents you with a series of “A vs B” choices where you have to pick the (in this case, book) that you like better than the other, and then sorts the list based on all your preferences. The reason I’m explaining this is because the hardest choice I got in the whole process of sorting this list was this, Deliverance, vs the previous book, Housekeeping. I sat there feeling myself leaning one way, then the other before finally coming down on this side of the fence.
The reason I hesitated so long over the choice was that, although they are pretty much polar opposites in every way, the more I thought about it the more it became clear that Housekeeping could be read as a book about 'femininity' and what’s expected from a young lady, while Deliverance is a book about 'masculinity' and what’s expected from a young man. The more I pondered that two-sided coin the more difficult my choice became until, eventually, I guess I chose the one that I can more obviously relate to. But, for the record, on another day, these two books could easily be in reverse order.
So this book, already. Notch up another run on the ‘I saw the film adaptation first’ with this one, and I think this is really the first one I’m doing (there are more, on this very post) where the book managed to surprise me in a big way, particularly vis-à-vis my enjoyment of reading it. I went in, as would practically anyone having seen the film first, with little more than duelling banjos and the unfortunately synonymous ‘squeal piggy, squeal’ line running through my head.
What Deliverance the book delivers, though, is the same thrill-ride of the film but also a fascinating, Heart of Darkness-esque fable about man’s incessant desire to overcome the elements, and the inevitable and tragic consequences when men find themselves (literally and figuratively) in over their heads.
There is a really beautiful fatalism to this story, taking on many dark overtones as we are reminded throughout that the four guys on this traumatising journey beyond the civilised world are just ordinary guys working office jobs day-to-day. As their baser and more animalistic instincts are brought to the fore, the darker side of humanity is revealed.
Deliverance is a really powerful work, and deserving of far more recognition than simply being the source material for the line “squeal piggy, squeal” which, by the way, isn’t even in the book. Knowing that James Dickey also wrote the screen adaptation, I’d say it was either a misstep on his part to add that bit, or possibly an actor improvisation. Either way, the book has a great deal more depth and intrigue than the film, and in particular the mythology around the film, might have you believe.
6) A Handful of Dust – Evelyn Waugh
So, as indicated by my italicised ‘almost’ in the introduction to Pale Fire earlier in this post, we weren’t yet at the end of TIME’s two-book authors. But Evelyn Waugh makes himself not only the final contender for that title but also one of the highest aggregate scorers of that esteemed company (outside of the obvious winner Mr Pynchon).
So while Brideshead Revisited made my top twenty last year for its graceful, nostalgic and melancholic rendering of a grander England between the wars, A Handful of Dust cracks my top ten this year for its delightfully acidic satire of the very same society that Brideshead seemed to revere.
As I said when discussing Brideshead, it seems apparent to me that Stephen Fry owes more of his mannerisms and language to Waugh than to Oscar Wilde (whom I’d always just presumed to be his greatest influence), and the Waugh that I read in A Handful of Dust is the absolute best in terms of that searing British wit, and that irreverence for British manners and an outdated class system.
I could describe the plot of this book basically as ‘rich people behaving badly’, although the reason it works so well here is that it adheres so closely to the societal norms that we see so often in more serious dramatic works, just stretched slightly beyond logic into the absurd. So we recognise everything we are reading as perfectly acceptable in the society of the time, yet see it in a fresh new light that makes me wonder why it couldn’t, in fact, be possible.
The ending of this book, though, is definitely a funny one. There was a moment or two where I really questioned where Waugh was taking this. While the final chapter maintains its satirical examination of the upper classes, it can't be denied I felt like it was straying too far, for a while. By the end, though, it became clear the satire is not just on the society but also the literature around that society; I was smiling and enjoying the almost dada-esque comedic elements again, and Waugh had most certainly won me over to his way of seeing things.
5) Native Son – Richard Wright
OK, so… I believe at the very start of this countdown, or rather when I was discussing my bottom-ranked An American Tragedy, I mentioned that this book was coming later in the list. Four-and-a-half posts later and here it is.
For some reason I’d read most of the ‘plight of black people in society’ books last year, and as far as I can tell, this was the only one remaining for me this year to read. But holy cow, what a book to finish on.
Native Son starts out innocuously enough: we have a young underprivileged black youth, with an unfortunate home situation and a similarly unfortunate proneness to aggression, who goes to work as a driver for a wealthy white family who are proud of their history of helping those less fortunate.
The sudden turn that this story takes is one that I can’t really discuss without spoiling the plot, but suffice to say it happens so suddenly, and with such heart-thumping impact that it made me (Bec can maybe attest to this) sit up in bed while I was reading and just shake my head.
From that initial turn, the book covers all sorts of territory, including a Dostoyevskian morality tale, a chase thriller and finally a legal courtroom drama. In its final phase it basically takes on the guise of a longform essay, unmasking the genuine plight of underprivileged black youth and exposing wherein the real guilt and shame should lie.
I learned while listening to Studio 360’s excellent ‘American Icons’ piece on Native Son that Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (my number four book of last year, you will recall) was written as a sort of reaction to this: a similarly angry, but somehow less morally ambivalent and confrontational piece exposing the same furious injustices. I’m not going to give myself a Sophie’s choice of favouring one or the other, though, because both books are absolutely supreme renditions of a marginalised people ‘acting out’. Invisible Man’s strength is in its subtlety, though, while Native Son’s is in the complete opposite.
4) I, Claudius – Robert Graves
This book was a real revelation to me, although there’s no reason it should have been. Given my love of medieval Icelandic sagas it should have stood to reason that a semi-fictionalised account of a tumultuous and fascinating period of history would definitely float my boat. But having never really developed an interest in Roman – or any ancient – history, it didn’t occur to me how well this fell into my wheelhouse.
Besides the style being one that I’m pretty comfortable with, what made Graves’ narrative come to life so much was what memorable characters he made of the historical figures. I mean, obviously he didn’t need much help with Caligula (basically one can just go "here's Caligula and some shit he did" and everyone's all like "Whoooa, are you kidding? What a ridiculously absurd character"), but the character of Livia in particular is one of the most delightfully malevolent, scheming characters – smart, cunning, all-powerful. While there was obviously political intrigue going on around Tiberius and Germanicus, it was Livia that kept me reading and kept me spellbound throughout this book.
What also makes the book perhaps more interesting than I’d expected was the position of Claudius as the narrator. Being thought of as a simple idiot, his family’s negligence and ignorance of his own intellect leaves him virtually unnoticed as he retells the goings-on in the corridors of power – he has no need to safeguard his own ambitions, but just watches events unfold from the fringes. This serves to give the reader the impression of unprecedented and intimate access, and oddly becomes an interesting parallel with the next book in my countdown.
I guess there’s nothing really more to say about I, Claudius: it’s simply a book that really fascinated and really entertained me.
3) One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – Ken Kesey
I haven’t been keeping score with the ‘I saw the film adaptation first’ tally, but I imagine we’re up to about five or six now – could this be the highest-ranked as well?
Firstly, I’ve always loved the movie of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, so it was with a little trepidation, or at least, anticipated tedium, that I approached this book earlier in the year. It took me about a paragraph for those fears to dissipate, since what Kesey presents in this book is a radically different story to what Milos Forman delivered in the adaptation.
As mentioned in the previous discussion, there’s an interesting parallel with I, Claudius here, in that both books are narrated by silent observers, whose presumed stupidity leads to unfettered access to the internal goings-on. In the case of this book, our narrator is the big, silent ‘chief’ Bromden.
This fact seems remarkable, coming from the film first, since Bromden is such a side – albeit omnipresent – character in the film. But like the filmmakers behind To Kill a Mockingbird changed it from being Scout’s story to being all about Atticus, so too did the filmmakers behind Cuckoo’s Nest remove the Chief’s narratorial status and made it all about McMurphy.
McMurphy is still the hero here, but he is the hero of a very different story. Kesey was very concerned – obsessed, even, by the sounds of things – by the plight of the Native American, and the Chief as our protagonist here is a victim of that marginalisation, feeling always estranged from his home, his family and his heritage, to the point where he tends to hide inside himself – a place free from what he calls ‘the fog’.
The fog is a very powerful image which the film dispensed with, standing essentially for the chaotic and intimidating maelstrom of modern civilisation, but at the same time growing thickest when the chief wants to retreat, so in a sense he finds himself then surrounded by it. But it's something I’m sure most of us have wanted to retreat from at one stage or another, and more than anything else the Chief just wants to be free. All of these themes were more or less retained in the film, but Kesey’s impassioned narration reveals them in their most raw and powerful beauty.
I’m not meaning to downplay the film: for one thing the film gives us a most memorable scene (And one of my all-time favourite film moments) in the ‘juicy fruit’ sequence where the Chief reveals to McMurphy for the first time that he can hear everything said to him, and can speak back as well. In the book there’s a similar scene but it’s less an enormous revelation (to us, obviously) and more about McMurphy confirming for himself what he already suspected.
So, unlike Atonement, I actually think watching the film first is a good way to go about this one. The book adds so much more texture and meaning to the dramatic caper of the film, while going in reverse order I think would just anger me, and I’d more likely see it as a desecration of a beautiful book.
2) The Painted Bird – Jerzy Kosinsky
Now I have to admit off the bat that, while I knew this book would be pretty high on my list, I didn’t anticipate it peaking at number two. It certainly doesn’t disappoint me, but the episodic structure of this book bears a striking resemblance to similar works that I’ve ultimately disliked, or certainly at least not liked enough to consider the second-best read I’ve had in a year.
Kosinsky, for those playing along at home, was best known for me as the writer behind the absolutely brilliant 1979 Peter Sellers vehicle Being There (and the novel from which he adapted it himself, although I haven’t read that), so I may have gone into this book with slightly mistaken notions of what I was in for – light-hearted comedy? Possibly with a dark edge? Errrm… no.
From the moment I read a farmer gouging out the eye of a farmhand with a spoon at the dinner table, I knew I was in for a harrowing time. And I wasn’t wrong, because immediately afterwards, the other eye follows.
This is just the beginning of, as I said, an episodic journey through a war-torn landscape that both is and isn’t Russia, and a tangle of diversely unpleasant, cruel, frightened and misguided characters. Our guide through the journey is a young boy whose dark features allow everyone he meets to paint him instantly as a gypsy come to curse their lot in life. This unfortunate physical difference is drawn out by the narrator in the analogy of the painted bird, where one brown bird is painted with bright rainbow colours and sent back instinctively to his flock, who of course immediately tear him to pieces, thinking him an outsider while the painted bird remains unknowing of the reasons for the sudden attack.
Although this book is above all harrowing, it is also a deeply moving fable about war and the hatred that can be kindled between people when the world stops making sense. Every page of this book is compelling, and contains a multitude of new, uncomfortable surprises with a ring of truth.
Would I recommend this book? Probably not, to most people. But it remains one of the more haunting and captivating reads I’ve ever experienced.
And with that, we are down to that big revealing moment… Have you done the checklist? Do you know what’s coming? Well, anyway, here is my traditional GIF of Barrack Obama laughing to increase the suspense:
1) Gone with the Wind – Margaret Mitchell
A surprising choice for number one? Not to me. It shouldn’t be news to anybody who’s spoken to me about books at all this year that I adored this book, but what might be news is that there is miles of daylight between this and The Painted Bird. While I was doing the sort, I needed to be reminded of some of the other books I’d really enjoyed but I knew this was always going to be pushing that number one choice and in the end there was no competition.
Where do I start? For one thing, as I ever-so-subtly hinted at when discussing Cuckoo’s Nest, this is both the last and highest-ranked of the ‘I saw the film adaptation first’ scorecard, and it’s sort of a funny one because, while I enjoyed the film adaptation well enough, it really didn’t speak much to me beyond being a well-crafted epic.
The book evidently spoke to me a great deal more. Even though, as we’ve discussed a fair bit on this countdown, I knew everything that was going to happen, it was every bit as gripping as if I were discovering it for the first time. I can put that solely down to the wonderful, effortless writing style of Margaret Mitchell.
The first compelling spell she weaves, of course, is with her characters. Although I couldn’t avoid having Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable in my head, and perhaps because of the more descriptively expansive nature of the ‘book as medium’, Mitchell paints a far more colourful and lively cast of characters, one that alone had me engrossed and completely emotionally invested.
Rhett Butler is the ultimate scoundrel: for the first third, or maybe half, of the book, his antics are the requisite tonic to everybody’s anachronistic notions of southern charm and manners, and I caught myself smiling with glee at a number of his more cutting aphorisms. But as the civil war ravages on and the book takes on more gravitas, Rhett’s character becomes more enigmatic and morally ambiguous – is he deep down an OK guy or is he really just a selfish cad?
Speaking of selfish, Scarlett. O, Scarlett. From page one she is the epitome of the selfish, spoiled brat: strong-willed, hot-tempered and never willing to compromise on having things her own way. What Mitchell created in Scarlett O’Hara is one of the most rare things in literature (or with full disclosure, in the books I usually read): an anti-heroine. For although we root for her throughout the story, she is rarely a laudable character, and her motives are always questionable. When she takes it on herself to steal the affections of Frank from her own sister, she becomes more than just a questionable character and every bit the cad that Rhett ever was.
Besides the characters, though, the novel tells the story of the south, in one story, as completely and as beautifully as Faulkner or O'Connor ever did. From the quaint charms of southern manners and hospitality at the start to the stubbornness of the fighting man during the war and the proud resilience after the downturn. It's a story of a place but also the story of a people, and if there's ever a book that could get bleeding-heart liberals like me rooting for Confederates, this is it. Although it does tip its hand into the same sort of casual racism for which D.W. Griffiths’ Birth of a Nation gets condemned, it all has an internal narrative logic that satisfied me even while the language was making me squirm a little.
A surprising choice for number one? Not to me. It shouldn’t be news to anybody who’s spoken to me about books at all this year that I adored this book, but what might be news is that there is miles of daylight between this and The Painted Bird. While I was doing the sort, I needed to be reminded of some of the other books I’d really enjoyed but I knew this was always going to be pushing that number one choice and in the end there was no competition.
Where do I start? For one thing, as I ever-so-subtly hinted at when discussing Cuckoo’s Nest, this is both the last and highest-ranked of the ‘I saw the film adaptation first’ scorecard, and it’s sort of a funny one because, while I enjoyed the film adaptation well enough, it really didn’t speak much to me beyond being a well-crafted epic.
The book evidently spoke to me a great deal more. Even though, as we’ve discussed a fair bit on this countdown, I knew everything that was going to happen, it was every bit as gripping as if I were discovering it for the first time. I can put that solely down to the wonderful, effortless writing style of Margaret Mitchell.
The first compelling spell she weaves, of course, is with her characters. Although I couldn’t avoid having Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable in my head, and perhaps because of the more descriptively expansive nature of the ‘book as medium’, Mitchell paints a far more colourful and lively cast of characters, one that alone had me engrossed and completely emotionally invested.
Rhett Butler is the ultimate scoundrel: for the first third, or maybe half, of the book, his antics are the requisite tonic to everybody’s anachronistic notions of southern charm and manners, and I caught myself smiling with glee at a number of his more cutting aphorisms. But as the civil war ravages on and the book takes on more gravitas, Rhett’s character becomes more enigmatic and morally ambiguous – is he deep down an OK guy or is he really just a selfish cad?
Speaking of selfish, Scarlett. O, Scarlett. From page one she is the epitome of the selfish, spoiled brat: strong-willed, hot-tempered and never willing to compromise on having things her own way. What Mitchell created in Scarlett O’Hara is one of the most rare things in literature (or with full disclosure, in the books I usually read): an anti-heroine. For although we root for her throughout the story, she is rarely a laudable character, and her motives are always questionable. When she takes it on herself to steal the affections of Frank from her own sister, she becomes more than just a questionable character and every bit the cad that Rhett ever was.
Besides the characters, though, the novel tells the story of the south, in one story, as completely and as beautifully as Faulkner or O'Connor ever did. From the quaint charms of southern manners and hospitality at the start to the stubbornness of the fighting man during the war and the proud resilience after the downturn. It's a story of a place but also the story of a people, and if there's ever a book that could get bleeding-heart liberals like me rooting for Confederates, this is it. Although it does tip its hand into the same sort of casual racism for which D.W. Griffiths’ Birth of a Nation gets condemned, it all has an internal narrative logic that satisfied me even while the language was making me squirm a little.
The fact that the novel is such an epic helps create that
completeness in terms of its scope, but certain passages nevertheless stand out
in my memory as particularly brilliant – for example when the Yankees are on
the verge of storming Atlanta while Melanie’s baby is due, so Scarlett has to
scour the deserted town trying to find Dr Meade: it’s gripping, edge-of-your-seat stuff, as scintillating as
literature gets. A real ‘keep reading and knowingly miss your bus stop’ kind of sequence.
Striking a similar bell to last year's number one Infinite Jest, when I reached the end of this book, I was genuinely heartbroken and deflated (even though, I hasten to reiterate, I knew it was coming). Not just because of the disappointment in concluding a book I'd loved reading, but because I just felt like I’d been through a war with these characters, and to watch them emerge the other side so strong and vivacious… it was touching, and inspiring. So Melanie's death, then Scarlett's sense of loss, her sudden clarity and regret and then Rhett's departure (he doesn't say precisely "frankly my dear, I don't give a damn' in the book) were actually a bit overwhelming.
Of course, I’m well aware that all of the high points I’m describing could very easily be said of the film adaptation as well. Characters… epic scale… heartbreaking… inspiring, etc. But they’re all obviously hallmarks of what is widely regarded as one of the greatest films of all time. I can’t say for certain why the book spoke to me so deeply when the film didn’t, but it certainly has all the hallmarks of one of the greatest books of all time.
So that's my reading challenge countdown. Hope you've enjoyed it as much as I've enjoyed writing it up and editing it to remove my crustier comments. Coming up soon, if I can be bothered, is a run-down of the movies I watched this year. With less faffing about, perhaps.
Striking a similar bell to last year's number one Infinite Jest, when I reached the end of this book, I was genuinely heartbroken and deflated (even though, I hasten to reiterate, I knew it was coming). Not just because of the disappointment in concluding a book I'd loved reading, but because I just felt like I’d been through a war with these characters, and to watch them emerge the other side so strong and vivacious… it was touching, and inspiring. So Melanie's death, then Scarlett's sense of loss, her sudden clarity and regret and then Rhett's departure (he doesn't say precisely "frankly my dear, I don't give a damn' in the book) were actually a bit overwhelming.
Of course, I’m well aware that all of the high points I’m describing could very easily be said of the film adaptation as well. Characters… epic scale… heartbreaking… inspiring, etc. But they’re all obviously hallmarks of what is widely regarded as one of the greatest films of all time. I can’t say for certain why the book spoke to me so deeply when the film didn’t, but it certainly has all the hallmarks of one of the greatest books of all time.
So that's my reading challenge countdown. Hope you've enjoyed it as much as I've enjoyed writing it up and editing it to remove my crustier comments. Coming up soon, if I can be bothered, is a run-down of the movies I watched this year. With less faffing about, perhaps.
posted by Sean's Beard at 11:04 PM
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