Books of 2014 Part 4: 20-11
Another write-up, where we plunge into my top 20 for a while.
#BooksReadForAbsolutelyNoReason
So again this hashtag is being misused, because like the
Colum McCann in the previous post, Tom Robbins was someone recommended to me by
our New York host Davis. This was the second Robbins that I read this year: the
first being Villa Incognito, which is
still to come, and this was one of two that Davis actually properly
recommended (the other being the still-unread Jitterbug Perfume).
Now the thing about Tom Robbins is that he writes the same
way I write. Not in the same way that Dave Eggers stole my idea and published
it, but in the sense that Robbins writes the same wacky, off-beat joke-riddled
prose as the sort of nowhere-bound rants that I would punch out in school when
I was bored. Only, unlike mine, Robbins has actually written and published his
gibberish, several times and they don't just end after one page when the main character for no reason "eats his own head". Although I’ve seen criticism of Robbins as being
‘masturbatory’, it shouldn't astound you to discover that this doesn’t diminish my enjoyment of, or my identification
with, his books.
Still Life with
Woodpecker, however, seemed to take itself a little too seriously for my
liking. Although Robbins always tends to ground his wackiness in some kind of social
commentary, I preferred his work in Villa
Incognito where it just seemed completely off-the-wall, whereas the story
here - a love affair between a whimsical princess who fancies herself an environmental activist and a fugitive
redhead terrorist named Bernard ‘the Woodpecker’ – seemed a bit caught up in
its own attempt at gravitas, and felt less jokey and more heavy-handed
than Villa.
It’s quite possible though that it’s all down to
expectations. Having my first taste of Robbins with Villa was an absolute delight, so then being told by Davis that
this book was even better meant that I was set up for disappointment. And
that’s not to say this book is disappointing – far from it – but I think
wherever it is superior it’s also just less whimsical and silly, demanding to
be taken seriously even in its playfulness.
So it gets a top 20 berth, but it will have to settle for
the bottom bunk.
#BookerPrizeWinners
So here we are, thirty books after Wolf Hall, and we come across the sequel. Following on pretty much
directly after the first book, Bring Up
the Bodies relates the tumultuous years of Anne Boleyn’s reign as queen of
England, again all through the eyes of Thomas Cromwell.
There are a number of reasons why I enjoyed this book more
than Wolf Hall (I won’t be drawn on
which one is superior, but I clearly enjoyed this far more): the first I
alluded to earlier, namely that some of the more confusing authorial mannerisms
that Mantel employs were tidied up here, so the action was clearer.
The second seems quite arbitrary, but the
history related in Bring Up the Bodies is
vastly more interesting to me. Wolf Hall seemed
to be a lot of Hamlet-level
indecision: will he? Won’t he? Whereas if I were to draw out the Shakespeare
comparison, this is more Titus Andronicus,
something’s always happening and it’s a big cloud of chaos and political
instability.
Perhaps, though, the reason is simpler: that Mantel’s
particular method of recasting history takes a lot of time to getting used to;
perhaps the length of an entire book. Therefore going into Bring Up the Bodies I had steeled myself for a challenge and
instead got a fascinating story. The other more obvious thing is that, while I
didn’t exactly have very high expectations for Wolf Hall, those expectations were far lower for this, and I was
happy to be pleasantly surprised.
#BookshelfCatchUp
I think I mentioned this book in my write-up of The Scarlet Pimpernel, as I read them
one after the other. This is another book that’s been sitting on my bookshelf
unread for years. In fact my history with this story goes back even further: to
when I was about six years old (possibly older), and my Dad made an ill-fated
attempt to read this book out loud to me and my brother and, being the
culture-loving and sophisticated little shite I was, decided I was bored and
went outside to eat my own poo or whatever it was I liked to do at the time.
So unlike most readers who greatly enjoy this book, I didn’t
come to it as a kid, but the good news is that you don’t need to, because it
remains a thrilling adventure at any age.
In this case, the little spoiler plot point is not such a
dampener as it was for The Scarlet
Pimpernel; namely that when Jim Hawkins is narrating the chance encounter
with this ‘great seafaring man’ Long John Silver and how he seems to be the
finest fellow and the saviour of their haphazard voyage, it takes on a tone of
dramatic irony to us in the know, rather than diminishing the great revelation. Part of that is that it
doesn’t take Jim very long to learn the truth about Silver.
Moreover, what is left out by the well-known fact in popular culture that Silver is a pirate
and a scoundrel is that he is also a
scintillating character of great moral ambivalence. He is charming, highly
intelligent and full of cunning wit, and it is the development of his character
that keeps you reading more than anything else. The other characters are somewhat stock types, and the story itself is quite familiar and clichéd now, despite it
being entirely the origin of such clichés.
It’s just a bit of escapism really, but it’s extremely
well-crafted and entertaining escapism. It’s been a while since I told my
six-year-old self how much he sucked, but he really did.
#BooksReadForAbsolutelyNoReason
Well the reason behind this book is fairly straightforward:
although It wasn’t on my bookshelf, it’s been too many years in my life for me
to have read only one Hemingway, the incomprehensibly overrated The Sun Also Rises. So naturally I
picked this one up from the library.
So my second taste of Hemingway had a very similar vibe to
my first: there’s a mumbling and detached style of writing here, where even
though it’s first person and is based on Hemingway’s own wartime experiences,
everything just feels like it’s happening to someone else. His narrator is
lacking agency, shall we say, for the most part. At the same time, it’s a
deceptively easy read (like others say The
Sun Also Rises is, overlooking the fact that it’s simply bollocks) and has
the ability to catch you by surprise.
Unlike in The Sun Also
Rises, what’s happening here is interesting, and emotionally striking. It’s
wartime, he’s making friends, and then he’s losing friends. There are
life-or-death struggles all around him, both on behalf of the enemy and on
behalf of friendly fire.
At the heart of it as well, it’s a love story – a wartime
love story full of suspense and bittersweet regret. I have to say the emotional
detachment on the part of the author made the essence of the romance pass by
over my head – that is, I was never quite sure of the nature of his feelings –
but the denouement is cathartic and emotionally gratifying.
#BookerPrizeWinners
So it’s back to Booker Prize Winners and the 1984 laureate
from our friends across the Tasman.
The Bone People is
a story about an unusual friendship that arises between a mysterious hermit
woman, a mute and violently unstable young boy and the boy’s adoptive father, a
Maori with a broken heart and a violent temper of his own.
While at times this book had a somewhat directionless
narrative arc - which made it feel a lot longer than it needed to - the heart of
the story is never far away, and when it comes down to it it’s a really
beautiful story, for all its brutal honesty.
What did annoy me, although it’s entirely my fault, is that
it wasn’t until I’d finished the book that I bothered looking in the back and
noticing that there was an index containing English translations of all the
Maori phrases peppered throughout the book. I may have actually gotten a
greater comprehension if I’d known about this, because otherwise I assumed I
could get the gist without knowing these (if you’re wondering, Google Translate
hasn’t yet added a Maori option, and I did look).
Even without it though, it’s a wonderful read, full of deep,
fascinating characters and a simmering emotional core. As we'll see later in this countdown as well, those Kiwi women sure can write.
#AustralianBooks
Yep it’s been a while since I returned to this particular
hashtag, and while this book could definitely come under #BooksReadForAbsolutelyNoReason,
there’s no way I would have picked this up if not for the esteem in which it’s
held by the Australian intelligentsia.
And all I can say now is that I, not a member of the
Australian intelligentsia, also hold it in very high esteem.
In many ways I can’t help but think of this as a fairly
typical Australian story. Englishman gets transported to Sydney, gets freed,
takes some land, discovers Aborigines live on the land, muscles them out
because it’s goddamn his, now. Basically it’s a story about Australia.
This is not, however, a typical book. Grenville’s prose is
not fancy but it makes its point, and while I wouldn’t say she managed to
excite my imagination, she has a piercing, unforgiving vision of what went on
in the fledgling days of this country. William Thornhill’s early history frames
everything that comes next: as a poor, disenfranchised outcast all he yearns
for is a place to call his own. Then with what seems to be a huge,
predominantly empty and uninhabited country surrounding him, he sees his chance
to settle himself down.
In that sense it channels the postcolonial viewpoint of a VS
Naipaul, for example. But more than just the yearning of the dislocated
colonial, Grenville embraces the fear and the mistrust on the part of the
dispossessed native owners of the land. What she brings to the table lastly
though is a bitter sense of humour about the narrative that Australia spins
about itself, asking with pointed venom at what cost we obtained the meaning of
our national identity.
#BookerPrizeWinners
I’d say this is the first of a few books that rank highly
largely through their defiance of my low expectations. Admittedly I went into
this book knowing absolutely nothing about its content, but I felt it was one
of those books that won acclaim upon release and then quickly faded from
everybody’s consciousness.
Where it really worked for me was in Jacobson’s wry humour
which is littered throughout. Frankly this was the funniest book I read all
year and there were quite a few occasions when I was having to stifle giggles
on the train.
In tone and story it reminded me a lot of Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, only instead of dealing
with Indians and Afro-Caribbeans in London, this deals with Jews. There’s a
kind of surreal quality to the exploration of characters and themes, as well as musings on the
titular ‘Finkler question’, whose own surreality is typified by the fact that
I’m still not sure exactly what the question is. The surrealism augments the
comedy, as well, because the ostensible depths of the characters’ personal and
emotional journeys are belied by a clinical eye for existentialism. That is,
the characters seem to believe they’re searching for the meaning of life, while
Jacobson points out they’re looking in all the wrong places, and questions
whether such meaning is even to be found.
As with a lot of films that I’ve loved that include
surrealist elements, though, I’m not sure if this book wholly lives up to its
own ambition. I enjoyed it a lot provided I didn’t take it too seriously. But I
can’t be certain that it doesn’t want to be taken more seriously, and once you
do I fear the book might reveal itself to be ultimately shallow.
#BooksReadForAbsolutelyNoReason
OK so this is probably the biggest stretch of that hashtag,
because those who have read all my previous book write-ups (Hi, Mother!) will
know that this book is part of TIME’s Top 100 list that dictated my reading
challenges for the past two years, and that this book was skipped by me for the
most arbitrary reason possible – namely, fuck off I can do what I want, you’re
not my real Dad.
Realistically though, I had never tackled a graphic novel
and it was easy to ostracise this one for being different. But having the
freedom to choose this year, I thought I should give it a go and find out what
the fuss was about. Good idea.
A friend of mine tried to downplay this to me, talking about
how its impact is lessened these days because it was the progenitor of the
whole ‘flawed superhero’ idea that has since become a cliché, but I didn’t find
that at all. Watchmen was tense,
gripping, and the heightened moral ambivalence throughout was challenging and
thought-provoking.
I can’t admit to being a convert to the graphic novel style:
it still felt a little over-stimulated and a little lightweight in the way it
gets its themes across. Those themes, however, are as relevant today as ever, and even if they’ve been done a million times in other books and series and
franchises, I can’t imagine they’ll be explored more completely and
interestingly than here.
Most of the credit must of course go to everybody’s
favourite Writer/Wizard/Mall Santa/Rasputin Impersonator Alan
Moore, whose structure and vision are compelling enough themselves, even if
I don’t geek out about the colours and blood-spattered drawings like others
might.
#BookerPrizeWinners
Let’s take a step back into the wonderful world of India and
the rich canvas it offers for intriguing drama. The Inheritance of Loss could well qualify for the
#BookshelfCatchUp hashtag as well, because we’ve had a copy on our shelf for a
good many years, but obviously the reason this was picked was more because of
its Booker-winning credentials.
This book was engrossing, and put me in mind largely of
Arundhati Roy’s 1997 winner The God of
Small Things, in the way that Desai interweaves her themes and her critical
assessment of India into a story about heartbreak and betrayal.
In many ways it covers similar territory to The White Tiger, only from a completely
different tack. The territory being that people born in India, particularly of a
certain caste, are fated to enjoy the same perils and misfortunes of the
generation before them, and it seems impossible to break the cycle.
Perhaps the reason I responded to this so much more strongly
than The White Tiger is that Desai
doesn’t offer any solutions or answers – even problematic as Adiga’s are – but
just allows her somewhat mournful voice to flow through the characters, to tell
their story and their problems.
It was also just an easy read, which can’t be overestimated
as a selling point unless it’s simply easy by virtue of being lightweight.
Lightweight this certainly isn’t.
#BookGroupReading
Wow. It’s been almost 40 books since my first and, so far
only, use of this particular hashtag, which I guess demonstrates how polarising
some of the book group choices have been this year. There are definitely more
to come: some in the bottom 14 and others cracking the top 10. But yeah, they
seem to sit only at the fringes, no middle-ground available.
Colorless Tsukuru
Tazaki and his Years of Pilgrimage (for convenience sake henceforth known
as ‘the book in question’ or ‘this book’ or ‘it’) was the book chosen for the
last Book Group meeting of this year and the one that I read with the most
ease, polishing it off in two days thanks largely to my reading it during Sydney Craft
Beer Week when I was off work. It was also my third of Murakami’s works and, so far, my favourite.
Tsukuru Tazaki is a character very much after my own heart,
in a heightened and fictional way. Being cut off apparently arbitrarily by his
group of four close friends after high school, he finds himself a hollowed-out
husk of the adult he thought he would grow up to be. To that end, a prospective
romantic partner charges him with the task of investigating the cruel severance
in order to achieve closure and move on.
I think this book – the book in question – it is perhaps
also the most Murakami-esque of his works that I’ve tackled. Norwegian Wood I felt lacked the
surrealism for which he’s renowned, whereas After
Dark was surrealism incarnate but seemed more of an exercise and lacked
emotional depth. So in spite of the mixed reaction this book – the book in
question – has received, it made me feel like I was finally starting to
understand Murakami as an author.
But what I liked most about this book was just how raw and
emotional it felt to me. Despite the subdued Japanese-ness of its characters
and the writing in general, it felt like a cry of anguish, but one that was
ultimately tinged with an uneasy optimism. It seems impossible to peg down
Murakami’s intentions but I
nevertheless felt a very strong cohesion throughout all of the disparate parts
and along the entire fractured timeline.
With that we are stopped just outside my top 10, so just to infuriate you, the next post will be an extra-long count-up of my bottom 13 books of the year before I finally unveil my 10 favourite reads of 2014.
posted by Sean's Beard at 2:13 PM
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