Books of 2018 Part 1: 50-41
Brief preamble: As I do every year, I will do the bulk of my books write-up in countdown form, beginning with number 50 in this case. Before I post my top ten books of the year, I'll take a step back to count up my bottom n books of the year. In 2018 I only managed to read a grand total of 57 books (shameful, I know) so it will only be a bottom 7 this year. But oh boy, there are some stinkers in there so fear not, bitter reader, you'll get your fill of hateful bile.
To my delight as well I discovered that my favourite place to link to books, the QBD online book store, is back up and running this year after being down for - I think - the previous two years of write-ups. So please click on some links and give them some web traffic. Maybe even buy shit from them, if you're so inclined.
(Edit: not all the books are available on QBD so in those cases you'll get linked to the Goodreads page. But QBD is otherwise my first port of call)
#ContinuingSeries
Ooh, what a way to start, with part four of Knausgaard's lengthy memoir and to me the most
problematic, for a couple of main reasons. It's mostly the problems that put this down in this lowly position, whereas parts 1-3 have been mainstays of my top 20s for the past few years. My first issue with this lies in the inevitable
comparison with Proust's A La Recherche du Temps Perdu. I find the premises of both are similar in that they are searching
for the profound in the mundane, but the difference is that this search, for
Proust, is quite explicit and extroverted in that he seeks to share this search
with us, whereas for Knausgaard it's incidental and quite egocentric in that he
seeks to find his own meaning purely for his own purposes and some form of catharsis. His focus on
developing his writing as a young man reveals that he has less wish to share
what he has to say with the world and more seeks to show off his own brilliance
and have people love him for it. But oh, they do: the rapturous reviews that
festoon this book are little short of god worship, in fact one even calls him
"a living hero". One thing you will notice about these reviews is the
names to which they are credited: Jeffrey Eugenides is one, Jonathan Lerner is
another. There's probably one floating around from someone called Chad
"Brick" Lundgren. They're all men, is what I'm getting at, and that
leads into my main issue with this book: it is very blokey, to the point of
heavy misogyny. Not to spoil too much but the final moment in the book is a pure
and simple rape, that he doesn't acknowledge or deal with but leaves us with
almost as an amusing passing anecdote. But throughout the book, which is
basically a coming-of-age story with Knausgaard between 16 and 19 years old,
trying to write and trying to lose his virginity while dealing with a
self-induced cock-block of his own premature ejaculation issues. Therefore all
the women - including the pubescent girls he teaches at a northern Norwegian
school - are all objects of desire and beauty, and are all defined by his own
lust for them or lack thereof. It just feels like a very boyish romp that has
little self-awareness or empathy. That's not to say he's not self-aware: no, the
warts-and-all style certainly continues in this volume, but I feel that that
plays very much into the rapturous phallocentric reception of this book, in
that men can read this and immediately identify with the problems and the
struggle with trying to get women to fuck you and get your own enjoyment out of
them. But the most problematic thing about the book is that, as a man myself, it was
easy to buy into that despite my reservations: it is an eminently, powerfully
readable book, full of interesting and relatable anecdotes. Knausgaard as a
selfish and arrogant youth trying to forge an identity for himself is a figure
who transcends geographic and cultural boundaries, but the Norwegian settings
are also evocative and somewhat magical. I just feel that there's an
unapologetic chauvinism that he doesn't seem conscious of, whereas by contrast,
the second book in the series, A Man in Love, dealt with the breakdown of his
first marriage in what I felt was a far more mature and sympathetic way reflecting after many years have past,
despite him including his ex-wife in the warts-and-all portrayal and giving her no right of reply. He just felt like a wiser and more
reasonable person there, whereas here he delights in revisiting and
perpetuating his youthful toxic masculinity, and comes across as an arrested
adolescent in the process.
#AuthorsIvePreviouslyEnjoyed #AtLeastSomewhat
Barnes definitely has this way of writing certain narratives. So of the previous two works of his I've read: one, the Booker-winning Sense of an Ending, was pure fiction; the other, Arthur and George, a fictional imagining of an actual historical event. This is similar to the latter, in that we're introduced to a noteworthy but ordinary fellow called Dimitri in post-revolutionary Russia, and by and by discover that he's not simply noteworthy but is Shostakovich; similarly to the casual way that the upper-class socialite Arthur in Arthur and George is off-handedly identified a third of the way through as Conan Doyle of the Arthur variety. He just introduces us to these characters as people before outlining the reason why we should be interested and make us reevaluate both his narrative and any previous narratives we may have had about the person. Anyway, this is an interesting little diatribe and monologue in many ways about the forces of power, the power of art and the ambivalent nature of courage under various guises of a communist regime. Barnes' Shostakovich is a coward, but a coward who feels both deeply ashamed of his cowardice and also stoically self-conscious of the value of his cowardice, while wrestling with the measure of his music and its legacy. It is quite a dogmatic narrative as Barnes' usually are, philosophically interesting and raising a lot of questions but also rather didactic to a fault, where it makes you think, but largely instructs you on what to think about. Worth reading but not amazing.
#AuthorsIvePreviouslyEnjoyed
I feel a little uncomfortable about this one in the final analysis,
because it's kind of awkwardly uplifting and optimistic. Throughout the story,
set over the course of one Saturday in the life of neurosurgeon Henry Perowne, I
kept feeling like it was building to a McEwanean tragic climax where his entire
life would come crashing down in an inferno of wasted dreams. The narrative
gives this kind of impression as Perowne's thoughts ramble on in this
self-important and incredibly loquacious, professionally detached kind of way.
He feels like someone who sets himself so far apart that he's bound to be cut
down. And indeed it almost works out that way as the events of this day all
converge into a crucible of fatalistic vengeance precipitated by Perowne's
naivety. The fact that McEwan then delivers Perowne into a bright, optimistic
future feels really quite disingenuous and takes on a sense of middle-aged
fantasy. The backdrop of London in the days of Hans Blix's inspection tours of
Iraq and the anti-war protesting serves to give this a kind of utilitarian
humanism: that the choices we make will either be for the benefit of all
humanity or have echoing repercussions for generations. So the kind of manly
take-charge aphorisms of Perowne as he steers the steady course of least
resistance just feels quite glib and saccharine to me. McEwan is a competent
enough writer not to put the boot into his own cynicism here but leave his reputation for unapologetic bitterness in tact, but he feels like
a man wanting to ameliorate his own legacy a bit as he ages and possibly confronts his impending
mortality. And I'm not sure how I feel about it.
#AuthorsIShouldReadMore
I felt I should read to get a better handle on Angela Carter, or more specifically why
I don't like her as much as other people do, having read only one (The Magic
Toyshop). And this neatly answers a fair bit of it. Firstly her prose is
extremely dense. There's a density from ye olden folk tales that she's
subverting, but a further density in that she is subverting the style;
exaggerating it at times and undermining it at others, so it's quite slow-going
to get through the layers of narrative artifice. The other thing is not a criticism
but just a personal shortcoming for me, in that I never really grew up on
fairytales, so the imagery evoked, recharged and even satirised here doesn't
stir up any feelings and it ultimately feels quite academic. Some of the trope
subversions I enjoyed - like the first take on Red Riding Hood, The Werewolf - while others like The Courting of Mr Lyon, a take on Beauty and the Beast,
felt almost like a retelling of the original story but with an injection of
female sexual agency. Some of them almost feel like "fairytale with
sex" and I'm not close enough to source material or inspirations to get
much more than that. And isolated bit of prose that struck me as extremely clumsy was in the title story, our narrator has just discovered something - let's say -
mildly troubling about her new husband so she goes to phone her mother and
writes "of course, the lines were dead" why "of course"?
Because you're aware that you're in a gothic horror story? And fully conscious
of its tropes? There's no reason for her to find the lines being dead anything
less than mildly surprising except if making a self-conscious nod to the
omniscient reader. It just served as a warning sign to me that the style and
spirit of this book was going to be a bit heavy-handed and that was how I
ultimately found it.
#ClassicsIShouldRead
Another set of short stories. The title story here is a good,
intriguing read; it invokes a strong sense of place and time and involves a
compelling espionage narrative where personal feelings interfere with broader
sociopolitical movements. The remainder of the stories invoke the same sense of
place and time but lack direction (almost consciously, like they seem like
reflective snapshots of life rather than "here's what happened from X to Y"). While they are interesting as portraits of life in wartime Shanghai, with its
political uncertainty and the uncomfortable intersection of eastern and multiple
western cultures, I fear they will be unmemorable to me except as a general
aesthetic and a cultural artifact. I didn't get a strong sense of the
characters or psychology or any great conflict except insofar as it's a
commentary on the state of Shanghai society.
#AuthorsIShouldReadMore
Picking up a Virginia Woolf for me feels like the definition of
insanity: doing the same thing and expecting different results. But I also feel
like I need to keep giving her chances to impress me; or rather to engage me.
She's obviously a talented writer but her diversions into directionless asides
and descriptions just lose their grip on me. This is, I feel, a somehow more
enjoyable read than To the Lighthouse and possibly Mrs Dalloway (hence it lifting Woolf out of the customary position of the bottom n of the year) just because the
philosophical and allegorical scope of this feels larger because its universe
is so much larger. It and its protagonist span several centuries, take on
different forms and explore interesting questions about art and gender politics
throughout history. I'd be lying if I said I was really absorbed at any point,
but it is an interesting exercise in 'biography' that allows Woolf to delve
into some of her pet topics like female agency and the freedom of expression.
Ultimately I will just dismiss this and consign her again to my "if I have
nothing better to read" pile, but there was some substance here beyond the
modernist fuck yous to formalism and narrative structure, and that deserves
some credit from this anti-modernist curmudgeon.
#AuthorsIShouldReadMore
Yes, the 50-41 sequence is definitely the spot for short story collections apparently. I'm not especially familiar with arguably the former Czechoslovakia's foremost writer, although I watched the film adaptation of his novel Closely Watched Trains many years ago so that was the key draw here. Hrabal takes some getting used to in this form, and even in individual
stories. These stories all exist in the same universe and even it would feel in the
same neighbourhood or even the same block within an industrial milieu in
Prague. There's kind of three types of stories here: bizarre, surreal dreamscapes;
interweaving diptychs; and 'day in the life' skits, and the latter two are both
the most effective and the most digestible. It has a very grimey industrial
feel that is fairly intriguing and enjoyable but in a short story way is kind
of cinematic and also fairly fragmented. Worth discovering and Hrabal is worth delving more
into. Perhaps.
#BooksIReadForNoReason
Curiously I picked this one up along with See You at Breakfast? by Guillermo Fadanelli (more on that to come) and discovered after reading this that they're both from the same translator and likely both part of a push to unearth some more Latin American literature for an English-speaking audience. This is an intriguing, but kind of baffling book. In content
it's very similar to a "youth travelling aimlessly, and through Europe" cliché but it's all told retrospectively whereas those narratives are often in-the-moment who-am-I-going-to-fuck-tonight type narratives. The timeline is
the baffling part here because it's all fractured as it leaps from one timeline to
the next. The whole narrative is kind of fractured as well, from Berlin to
Madrid to Argentina to other parts of Europe and other unspecified parts of
South America/Argentina. It's got a good meditation on trauma and the resultant
psychology, and there's a nice yearning to this throughout. Takes some getting
used to and probably demands closer attention because it just feels a bit piecemeal
on first visit.
#AuthorsIvePreviouslyEnjoyed
The immediate thing that struck me on reading this book was that it felt
like Updike doing Iris Murdoch: we're quickly introduced, via the setting of a
party, to a large cast of characters who are all intertwined with each other in
ways we know will tangle further as the story unfolds. The whole conceit of the
story is it's a group of married couples in a small town who intercouple
with each other and who each feed off the gossip and intermingling in order to
sustain their interest in life. It's a very Murdochean premise but in Updike's
hands, it's handled with far less subtlety, and far more self-indulgently.
Beyond his long stream of consciousness descriptive passages, which add little
besides length to the reading, his characters are generally more cardboard
cut-out where Murdoch would bring even the most incidental characters to life
with psychology and history of their own. Here the focus is a little all over
the place as well. It's primarily the story of Piet, who becomes the town's
unfortunate philanderer through a series of liaisons, but there's also lip
service paid to a couple of other romantic trysts that are sidenotes and become
ultimately pointless subplots, that again could be dispensed with to make the
story shorter, and more efficient. It's not that the story is ineffectual or
dull; it's engaging in the way a complex soap opera plot can always be, with an
Updikean perversity and voyeurism to it, depicting this small town with his
characteristic cynicism and misanthropy. But it's kind of ham-fisted and
excessively long-winded a lot of the time, with everything being spelled out in
great detail rather than just letting the defining actions reveal its themes
and philosophy - again the way Murdoch would do, deftly. It ends up just
feeling bloated and schlocky when a trimmed, more focused narrative could
effectively deal out an impactful drama giving pause for reflections on human
nature and sexuality. Yes, it's unfair to compare any writer to Murdoch (who, incidentally, I seem to have bypassed entirely this year so maybe I'm in withdrawal) but if you're going to play in her court, be prepared to be thrashed.
#AuthorsIShouldReadMore
It's interesting that the first story in this haphazard collection of Sontag's prosaic writings, about a high school visit to meet
Thomas Mann and discuss his work, is called Pilgrimage while the
second, about planning a trip to China where the narrator was conceived and
where her father died, is called Project for a trip to China.
I feel it really speaks to Sontag's academic soul, that the famous writer conversation is
something very personal and spiritual while the personal family trip is
something detached and emotionless. I think there's a distinct academic strain
running through all of these; they're all very Sontag, from the surreal analogy
of sexual politics American Figures to the reimagining of Jekyll
and Hyde in Dr Jekyll as two separate entities who have been
discharged from a mental deprogramming clinic. She plays a lot with style, and
I would argue a bit too much, since being Sontag she seems to be less
interested in telling a story as she is in making a point, so some of the form
malleability here seems more of the academic exercises in using a curious
intellectual vehicle to arrive at her point. In fact Dr Jekyll as
the penultimate story in this collection actually felt like the first, and
indeed only, conventionally-written narrative. The rest felt like a towering
intellect deigning to exercise different formal muscles, and the whole thing
felt very elusive. The final story was quite moving, and it was probably the
only one that had any real effect beyond making me think. And yes, of course I
love, in fact actively seek out writing that makes me think, I just feel like
this goes about it the wrong way. Sontag is just most effective in academic form.
posted by Sean's Beard at 6:50 PM
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