Books of 2016 Part 6: My Top Ten
#Borrowed
So from the bottom end of McEwan’s oeuvre to this very
intriguing story. It feels really quite far-fetched and left-field for a McEwan,
even while it deals with his pet themes of "everybody sucks" and
"everybody is a psycho that you should probably kill as a pre-emptive
strike, because everybody sucks". What's interesting is the first person
narrative (which self-consciously changes tack a couple of times) which makes
us unclear, throughout, whether the protagonist is under actual threat or is
suffering from a paranoid delusion, and it takes a lot of twists and turns as
the narrative goes further down the rabbit hole. It also plays a lot of tricks
with the title which obviously sounds very un-McEweny, but I should have
comfortably predicted that it would all come back to his world view that
everybody sucks. It's cynical, kind of harrowing and unsettlingly hilarious
too. It’s my kind of book.
#BookShelf
Rare to find anything from the 19th
century in my top ten, but this was a very interesting read, and a good
introduction to Eliot who is one of Bec’s favourites (whom I hadn’t read). I
spoke with Bec briefly about her writing style and basically crystallised it as
"dense but still engaging" (Bec hasn't read Middlemarch but has read others). Her prose is in many cases even
more dense and layered and ‘of its time’ than Dickens, yet even without the
narrative pace of Dickens it can be engaging and introspective and sometimes
she'll just throw out a casual reflection that cuts right to the heart of the
matter. And unlike another writer of immense (also stodgy, sodden-wet and
ghastly boring) density, D.H. Lawrence, even in her most languorous passages Eliot
manages to get the point across without much effort required from the reader.
That said, how does this little snapshot of love and life in a country village
stack up? Character-wise I felt there were a few too many named characters that
didn't have a lot of personality. Dorothea is relatable and laudable, Lydgate
is 'moral' and idealistic, and Rosamond I found capricious and reactionary. Apart
from that, what people do is all I could really discern from them - including
our other heroes of Fred and Mary - and the predominant behaviour seems to be
gossip, which I guess makes the town itself the leading character and the
people within merely narrative agents. I did enjoy this read a lot though, I
enjoyed her thoughtful and involved storytelling, I enjoyed the vicissitudes of
sentiment, misunderstanding, prejudice and hasty judgments throughout. It still
feels very 19th century and removed from me, but even just as an artefact it's
an enjoyable one.
#Borrowed
It’s funny coming to these books that have such a
singular reputation, you can't really know what to expect. And this is a
singular experience, fluid (in the sense of meandering and unstructured) with a
weird blurring between historical fiction, family saga and magical realism.
It's quite clear why Rushdie would regard this as the greatest novel of the
last fifty years (which he does, according to the cover of this edition), as
it's right in his wheelhouse of fanciful narrative that somehow maintains
gravitas. It's full of what Bakhtin calls the ‘carnivalesque’ and it manages to
craft some real beauty and pathos out of otherwise completely unhinged prosaic
chaos. So did I like it? It's a fascinating ride through these weird, at times
morbid, at times hilarious tunnels, and as you emerge out the end it's not
really emerging into the light as it is being swamped further by confusion. At the
end of the day while it's definitely a singular experience I'm not entirely
sure what point it was trying to make - about folklore, the stories people tell
about themselves, about the life/death duality (or is it a duality?) or about
love and family and loyalty. I liked it a lot, but in a baffling kind of way.
#BoughtToRead #ReadAllTheMurdoch
Another difficult book to get into, as it drops you
right in the middle of a large bunch of interconnected characters, but once you
get slow-drip reveals of their haunted pasts and aspirations and regrets it
becomes yet another rich tapestry of cruel, even heartless Murdochean irony. The
themes here are less overt than in previous works of hers I’ve read, but can be
summarised as ‘love is a disease which only reality can cure’. I've spoken in
the past about how remarkably Murdoch writes the male consciousness. From this
book it seems possible that she may actually be slightly misogynist. Her
females here are largely 'types' - the waifish, flighty pixie girl Gracie, the
crotchety maiden aunt Charlotte, the do-gooding, signalling interferer Clara.
This is not to say her females aren't engaging and sympathetic, not at all; but
in this book the females are there to play roles, while the men drive the
action. I guess the most cutting theme explored here is that of love, and
relationships, and what we expect of each other and when that breaks down. A
very Murdochean summary of marriage: "we might have been better off if we
had [found out what quarrelling is like]. We've never fought each other for a
principle, we've always preferred peace. We've each surrendered our soul to
please the other. Perhaps this doesn't matter. Perhaps this is what love
is." Another captivating, complex narrative from an amazing storyteller
and yes, Murdoch maintains her fixture in my top ten write-ups.
#Library
You’ll probably remember Bolaño from The Savage Detectives (my number 13 book
of last year). It’s a shame that he passed away without producing more than a
handful of works, because he really wrote more ambiguously yet engagingly than
anyone I can think of. I'm not usually one to really rate collections of short stories
or essays (and this has both, in the one volume) but this is really an
entertaining, thought-provoking and variegated read. As such a muser and an
ambiguous writer, his stories don't end with conclusions but rather
continuations, which can be off-putting at times but also leaves you pondering.
"Police Rat" is a genuinely fascinating read on society and
conformity and the germ of disorder that spreads, while his essay on illness,
writing/escapism/travel and ennui is sharp and quite devastating. Highly
recommended, especially if you don't feel you have the stamina for The Savage Detectives.
#Library
In theory, this book could have felt overly
familiar: it follows a similar path and themes to 1984, Brave New World,
even - dare I say it – Logan’s Run (but
of course I dare, because it's a phenomenal movie fuck YOU). But I think We, more effectively than those - or even
anything - explores a very interesting thought, and one which has always fascinated me: that the curtailing of freedom, even of
humanity, creates a necessary equilibrium that is ultimately peaceful and
harmonious. Even though it horrifies us as free-thinking individuals, in a society
where individual differences - without human nature, feelings or imagination -
there is no conflict, and even no limits to what we could work to achieve.
Basically, in theory at least, it could be a utopia. In theory. And that's
really what comes to the fore here, and because it was written before all the
others it really is an essential of the genre. The mathematical fetishism of
our protagonist and narrator is fascinating, as is the exploration of the
collective, homogeneous "we" where any disparity from that norm opens
up a schism, on the other side of which is a necessary "them". The
state itself is also a historically curious one, as it's theoretically Plato's
republic but it’s seen through a post-industrial lens, even an early Bolshevik pre-Stalinist lens. So the whole thing revolves around the sacrifice of
individual needs for the collective good, but all in the service of
constructing a better world or possibly even escaping our own entropic one. I
think the book becomes a little chaotic later on, when the schism happens in our
protagonist's mind, caught between a mathematically precise bliss of rigid
structure and a wild intangible imagination of the soul: thoughts are left
unfinished and chains of thought unlinked, but it's all part of Zamyatin's
curious narrative structure. Ultimately it's more fascinating than it is
immediately affecting and compelling but it is very, very fascinating.
#Library
I’d long wanted to read something from Joyce Carol
Oates, but although there’s a huge selection in our local library there are
none of what I would consider the essential ‘intro’ to Oates based on what I’ve
heard. So naturally instead I went for the one with the most provocative title
possible. This is unapologetically manipulative, as it rightly should be. The
opening section is confronting, unpleasant, and basically indicative of
everything that generally seems to happen in a rape case. Oates' decision to
set it in a small town, and a well-known, familiar small town at that (Niagara
Falls, the US side), gives it a sort of credibility that feels like it could
almost be a memoir, a point of view retelling of something that may well have
actually happened. The second part then takes on the generic conventions of
your "revenge fantasy," exploring similar territory to what Tarantino
was doing with Inglourious Basterds
and Django Unchained - a vigilante
justice, righting historically prevalent wrongs and correcting problems with
the "system". It's as relevant as ever, reading this after Brock
Turner was granted his easy release and it really makes you confront your value
system and notions of loyalty and commitment to truth. At the same time it's
undeniably unsettling and any enjoyment you get from reading the revenge
section is somewhat perverse and problematic. Oates’ most interesting and yet
most manipulative narrative choice is voicing most of it in the second person,
speaking to the daughter of the rape victim who witnesses the crime unfold and
then witnesses the effect it has on her mother. It’s a ripe and timely middle
finger to victim blamers, deniers, enablers and rape apologists the world over
and one that confronts the whole “what if it was your own daughter?” question
in a really evocative way.
#Library
So thankfully my Australian literature this year
wasn’t all depersonalised Patrick White drivel. Obviously picked this up due to
my half-arsed attempt at getting through all the Booker Prize winners at some
point in my future, and was really taken aback by how devastating this story is.
An epic tragedy about war, its effects on people, its effects on families and
the removal of innocence. But more than that it’s also an intimate portrayal of
a love affair, interrupted by the war and ended by shameful lies and
misunderstanding. More specifically it’s a book about the past and its haunting
effects on the present, and regret at things we’ve done and those we should
have done. There’s an enormous, long-sighted scope to this, with many voices
and experiences being used to create a harrowing vision of a conflict and its
lingering aftermath. It crept up slowly on me, this, and delivered a bit of a
gut punch in the end that I didn’t see coming. It felt a little by-the-numbers,
until it revealed its full explosive power and frankly left me a bit stunned.
#Library
I picked this one up on a half-hearted whim about
halfway through the year, when I felt I hadn’t yet had that one really standout
book yet, and not even all the way through I knew this had become my book of
the year so far. Nothing else has been quite so engaging, and I was into it in
the first few pages. Potok writes great imagery as well as great introspection,
and from the start of this bildungsroman
of sorts, while the character is a young boy, he establishes early the central schism
between his Hasidic faith and his urge to draw. It’s not technically a bildungsroman, as it finishes with our
protagonist still as a young man with a longsighted view of the future. The
book crystallised a lot of the Jewish condition for me; that overarching
loyalty that you owe to your people and their struggle, and it's well
personified by his father, who struggles with his son's calling but copes with
it in an adorably familiar way (for example, repeatedly telling him to
"drink your juice or the vitamins will go out of it"). It also has
lots of interesting things to say about painting, which become more technical
and a bit more obtuse as he grows older and understands it more theoretically.
But the dramatisation of the climax, as he has to decide between his faith (and
in turn his parents and the whole Jewish experience) and his art, is
devastating. And the tension between the two callings and the dichotomy that
exists in his own mind are brought to a vivid and poignant end. Bittersweet
reflection on the importance and gravity of art and the wrestle with faith.
And if my calculations are correct, that brings us
to…
#BoughtToRead
It won’t be a surprise at all to learn that my
entire audience (Hi, Mother!) has just reacted with some level of surprise,
that a book they’ve never heard of from a writer they’ve never heard of has taken
out my top spot. So let me introduce you to the wonder of Elnathan John. He’s a
Nigerian satirist and writer who for a while was my favourite person on
Twitter, until early in 2016 or late 2015 he unexpectedly deleted his account
and disappeared. Disappointed as I was, I knew this book was coming out in the
UK and USA midway through 2016, and I’d been looking forward to reading it for
so long, it was inevitable that my high expectations would be disappointed. It
was a very pleasant surprise that they weren't. Elnathan's writing style is so
perfect for this narrative, about a young man's journey into adulthood against
a backdrop of the rise of Islamic extremism in Nigeria. It reminds me of why I
miss him so much on Twitter, and why he worked so well in that 140-character medium.
His prose is stark, simple, to the point, in exactly the way that mine isn’t.
He conveys a great deal of meaning efficiently, but also serves to make very
sharp, plaintive insight of what are extremely complex issues. In this story,
the concise storytelling serves to heighten the build from a young man learning
simply about the world at large, to the horrifying ordeals, sights and events
that unfold when that world spins into chaos. While it's very much a story
about Nigeria, and northern Nigeria specifically, there's a commonality here to
every place that has seen a sharp rise in extremism, and Elnathan's curious and
straightforward protagonist is the perfect lens through which to watch it turn
from understanding, respect and hope to a crushing heartbreak and humiliation
as firmly held beliefs become doubted, twisted and subverted under any and all
of the right painful circumstances. He’s maybe a little naïve in his
expectation for a community where people can continue to find common ground in
the middle rather than diverting to opposing extremes but the very idea of
calling his wide-eyed simplicity naïve is its own devastating indictment of the
way the world seems to be going. This is an unpolished, but astoundingly
effective and relevant masterpiece.
posted by Sean's Beard at 1:45 PM
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