Wednesday, January 02, 2019

Books of 2018 Part 3: 30-21


#AuthorsIShouldReadMore
This was my first taste of Nick Hornby (in original form at least). I liked it well enough; he definitely has a kind of populist tone to a lot of his work, the way he taps into both the nature of obsession here while also dealing with ordinary people, their everyday neuroses and hang-ups. There's a distinct cynicism in this book in its treatment of the nature of fandom, and the construction and deconstruction of artistic expression. Tucker Crowe, the elusive genius and creator of the eponymous stripped-back rock album, I feel is kind of the weak point in this narrative because he feels like a cookie cutter rock star character who's humbled himself with years of self-neglect and effacement. He's really just a plot point in this narrative about obsessive fan and self-proclaimed expert Duncan and his long-suffering sidelined paramour Annie. There's definitely a good sense of humour on display here, and Hornby does have some interesting observations about art, music and the devolution of criticism to a democratized form. I found the funniest parts of this though to be kind of peripheral to the story, and almost tacked-on: namely the sessions Annie has with her neurotic and haplessly prudish 'therapist' Malcolm. It feels like an odd narrative device to frame parts around her recapping the misadventures to this therapist who hasn't the foggiest clue how to help her, but Malcolm and his conservative, gormlessly disapproving clucks were hilarious. This was fairly light fare in many ways with some clunky passages and characters that don't necessarily get resolved completely, but plenty of enjoyment along the way.

#AuthorsIvePreviouslyEnjoyed
"Every day I ask myself the same question: How can this be happening in America? How can people like these be in charge of our country? If I didn't see it with my own eyes, I'd think I was having a hallucination."
This was an interesting read. It's strange to think of Roth’s historical context, this being written during the Bush (jr.) era when there was a certain level of 'criticism = sedition' but reading it now, it seems far more chillingly prescient. Set in an alternative history, the anti-Semitic aviator Charles Lindbergh challenges FDR on a ‘non-war’ platform at the 1940 election, and wins. It's told from the POV of a (fictionalised) 8-year-old Roth and his fearful Jewish family watching events unfold as Lindbergh strikes a peaceful accord with Hitler's Germany and remains bewilderingly neutral in light of the rampage of the Nazis across Europe (which of course is more rampant given the US non-involvement). It's an interesting historical/memoir hybrid style, as it zooms the focus in and out of the family to then give a rundown of the broader global, cultural and geopolitical shifts that happen to precipitate the fears and traumas inflicted on the family. Lindbergh, with his aviation publicity stunts, flying to particular strongholds to rally support, with his empty rhetoric and emboldening the far-right movement, he reminds me of... someone...who wasn’t yet in this picture yet when Roth wrote the book. It's an interesting thought experiment that I feel Roth kind of hurries to wrap up at the end, and I feel there's a gripping insidiousness to the platitudes and spin that Lindbergh and his cronies dish out, seemingly friendly and reasonable but really sinister and scurrilous. And in the end it kind of goes a bit off the deep end too quickly, with the 'plot' suddenly unravelling. I feel it's a fascinating read but it would have been more impactful and powerful if it continued its slow burn to its conclusion rather than quickly burning out.

#BooksIReadForNoReason
This reads somewhat similarly to an Iñarritu film - at least the early ones before his sole purpose was manufacturing Oscars - because it has a kind of ordinary everyday people in Mexico City narrative where all the protagonists are tangentially related to a central violent incident. It's difficult really to sink my teeth into this, because it felt like it was trying to draw a purpose from the story but in the end it felt largely descriptive and slightly inconsequential, despite the slight overtones of irony - the irony of coincidence, and of pious platitudes - throughout. There's a distinct cynicism in most of the protagonists' world and yet the denouements of the various parts of the story seem to suggest Fadanelli has an optimistic view of justice and relationships. He has a fairly voyeuristic and blunt interest in sex, particularly sex as transaction, which felt a bit overboard at times. I appreciated that this was short and fairly easy reading (it was one of a handful of books I picked up purely to up my reading quota) but didn't really find I was able to love it.

#AuthorsIvePreviouslyEnjoyed
This is an intriguing book, but one of the intriguing things is that it ends very ambiguously and enigmatically, and the way it ends made me doubt and question all that came before - not really in a good way. It just feels like DeLillo is maybe trying to achieve one thing, but the book doesn't tie it all up, and it ends up being just another example of DeLillo’s narrative directionlessness. For the most part the philosophy is all centred around his surreal observations of society set in an almost parallel universe that is New York and London in the 60s but not New York and London at the same time. For the most part I had trouble discerning if the narrative actually took place in the real world, or some inverted version of it, but in the end I think it's just DeLillo skewing reality slightly to make it seem uncanny and weird. So ultimately that's what I thought of it: it's uncannily weird, and the ambiguity of the story about the writer, the power of words and the political intrigue that writers carry with them – for the populace and the politburo as it were – is all weird surreal satire. It’s actually quite enthralling while reading but it needs an overarching point, and I felt the overall message was missing or lacking here.

#ClassicsIShouldRead
I had this on my to-read list for a long time after some online listicle made it sound interesting. I think the concept is interesting but it had diminishing returns in reading. It's a good twist on some familiar sci-fi tropes: the outsider syndrome, the alienation of extraterrestrial travel, the supercomputer ally/friend etc. The plot, revolving around an off-shore penal colony established on the moon and an organised revolution against Earth's authority over them, is engaging and the fact that it's told from the moon inhabitant's POV allows Heinlein to make some sharp satirical points about humanity's general hubris. Where it falls down is that it's written as a historical document, and the tone feels quite plodding at times. I was engaged with most of the characters, especially and inevitably Mike, the intelligent computer who longs to understand humans' sense of humour. The female characters are inevitably very male-written but without being overly sexified, not that Heinlein deserves that much credit for creating female characters that have more than sexuality to offer (as a sidenote, though: the blurb, which describes one of the key protagonists as our narrator's "luscious blonde girlfriend", is fucking unconscionable, especially as she isn't even his fucking girlfriend at any point in the story. Editors: don't let your 14-year-old coffee boy write blurbs when they haven't even read the book). Mainly the prose just felt administrative, systematic and dull through too much of its exposition, whereas a different narrative style could have made it simply more entertaining. My own enjoyment aside it's an interesting exercise in satire and exploration of political history through a sci-fi lens.

#ClassicsIShouldRead
Grabbed this off my bookshelf early in the year (before I had to clear it out) as I felt it'd been enough time since watching the Ang Lee film adaptation so it might feel relatively fresh, whereas I'd seen Mansfield Park more recently, along with Persuasion which were my other options. This is not bad; it suffers from a similar syndrome as Emma in that the stakes don't feel particularly high here, given that it's established early on that our protagonist family are in fairly lowly circumstances, so there's not much to lose and everything to gain in potentially marrying the daughters well. Therefore it largely comes down to a tale of love and disappointment, which is more worthy than whatever was at stake in Emma - entertainment and diversion for the heroine, I think - but less engaging than Pride & Prejudice where there is this sense of ambition, of heightened expectation as well as love, and filial loyalty and duty (which this also has). It doesn't have a whole lot in the way of plot though; most of it is elaboration, inner monologues, social observation, and the plot can be summarised very easily in three sentences: two sisters like men then discover they are engaged to others. One man deals with it honourably, the other doesn't. The first man gets cheated on and returns to claim the eldest sister and oh yeah there's also an old guy who likes the younger sister but he's like totes old. Anyway, my comparisons and ranking this in the middle tell nothing; it's wordy and a bit convoluted in the prose at times while some of the social mishaps and misunderstandings are a bit clumsy at times. But otherwise the characters - especially Elinor - are engaging and laudable, and the book overall is a decent read.

#ClassicsIShouldRead
This is alright; one thing I enjoyed about this when comparing it with typical Australio literature that I've previously disdained, is the setting. Suburban Melbourne between the wars seems so much more relevant and contemporary to me, but also an interesting historical document because while far removed from me, I recognise the locales as they exist now and can feel the vibe of the places Johnston is describing. This is even more so than Cloudstreet, which may have had a similar effect if I were as familiar with Perth as I am with Melbourne, but didn't for the reason that I'm not. One of the shortfalls for me here is that it is a little undirected in what its point is. The fact that it's called My Brother Jack feels a little glib because there's so much of this narrative that isn't about Jack in any way, and it almost feels like it's one memoir that the writer then went back to revise, and in the process inserted a whole bunch more deference and invocation of Jack to make Jack's influence on the story more palpable than it was. That being pivotal, even autobiographically it seems a bit front-heavy with all the juicy parts of David, our narrator, becoming Australia's key war correspondent and a primary figure in the propaganda effort, kind of squeezed into a small part at the back of the book and so much more emphasis given to his childhood and home life that really just sets the scene for where it all goes. I was engaged though, and intrigued by David's character as not so much the blank slate as so many other narrators of this sort are, but more of a chameleon who through his apparent guilelessness manages to fit into any situation where he finds himself.  As a sidenote, his war journalism makes him seem very canny and guileful indeed, but then I look back on the sequence where he is questioned by police over the rape and murder of an acquaintance with his friend standing accused, and his utter awkward ineptness in answering their questions is kind of pathetic). I struggle to see ultimately what the point of some of this book is and particularly what point he's making about Jack, but otherwise it's an engaging and tough look at Australia and suburbia in a tumultuous period of history.

#AuthorsIvePreviouslyEnjoyed
It seems odd that I'd never seen or even really paid attention to this book before; maybe I felt it was like Rushdie's Grimus, in that it's just an inchoate basis of what Ishiguro would grow into, and in some ways it is. It has all his trademarks: the bittersweet sense of nostalgia, the introspection and above all the unreliable, enigmatic narration that lets us in bit by bit on what the heart of the matter is. In this case the enigma is made quite explicit by our unreliable first-person narrator Ono, a renowned artist who reminisces about his life before, during and after WWII while trying to navigate marriage negotiations for his younger daughter. Ono frequently uses qualifications throughout, that such and such a person may not have said these exact words, and the rest of the exposition of his fallibility taking the form of arguments he has with his daughters or other characters where he's gotten one impression and they have another. In the end it's left pretty ambiguous, as is his character and the validity of any guilt, or shame, he feels over Japan's surrender in the war and any part he may have played in influencing the wartime culture of the country. I feel like the periodic reveals were more effectively and impactfully done in The Remains of the Day and most masterfully in Never Let Me Go, although in all three cases the reason for the unreliable narration tends to be because the narrator assumes a prior understanding and knowledge of the world being described in the reader. I just feel like here it ends up feeling like I didn't get a big revelation but rather just questioning doubt about who I'd just spent the novel with, listening to, and only a bittersweet feeling of post-war Japan and everything the people had lost. It's just an ambivalent feeling where in Ishiguro's later works the feeling was more cathartic - whether that catharsis be devastating (Never Let Me Go), redemptive (The Remains of the Day) or just magical (as in my #1 book of last year, The Unconsoled).

#AuthorsIvePreviouslyEnjoyed
No doubt Bolaño writes engagingly; so much so that I found this very gripping despite being a bit confused at the plot and the characters. Udo Berger is the German national champion at war games, and the story finds him keeping a holiday journal at a seaside tourist town in Spain with his girlfriend ahead of the big international war game convention. Early on it takes the form of a typical youth-travelling-abroad narrative as they throw in with fellow countrymen and mingle late in clubs with a couple of the locals. Then one of their friends goes missing while windsurfing and the coherent narrative goes a bit AWOL at the same time. Well not fully; it takes a radically different tack though, and our narrator in particular starts to lose his grip. He begins a game of his pet hobby, the titular Third Reich (a realistic WWII simulation where he plays as his native Germany) against a local character known as El Hermado (the burn victim) and tries repeatedly to seduce the beautiful German manager of his hotel. He also becomes inexplicably unhinged and the story, being told through his eyes, does likewise. It never becomes dull or incoherently written but I found it quite difficult to grasp onto the sentiment of the characters and engage with them properly. It actually becomes quite interesting through its obfuscation, and while I enjoyed Bolaño's The Savage Detectives as well, it's undeniably a dense and convoluted narrative in the same way. So maybe it's a translation thing or possibly his strength is in his imagining of situations, his exploration of interpersonal politics and psychology so while I found this a bit intractable, there’s definitely substance here to sink your teeth into.

#BaileysPrizeWinners
This is an engaging and in some ways eye-opening book. It seems odd to say this, but the prevalent theme here of racial relations and turbulence in post-war England doesn't seem like a topic that has had much coverage. In fact when I think of racism and its exploration in literature, it's almost exclusively American, or just colonial or post-colonial literature that happens to reflect the pervasive racism of its historical context. So this book and its depiction of Jamaican ex-pats trying to make their way both through WWII as British colonial subjects fighting for the mother country, and following the war in a fractured and broken Britain, it's a fresh and interesting perspective on history that I'd never really encountered before. Does that make it a great book? Not necessarily, of course. The main shortcoming of this basically is that the narrative feels quite fragmented; it seems more like a series of skits from the lives of these characters and I don't think Levy formed them into a holistic narrative that delivered any punchy themes. The 'before' sections (basically, each character's back story) take on this kind of pseudo-Dickensian quality when you consider all the coincidences and contrivances that end up taking place later on. As a result the 'before' sections seem mostly unrelated to the central, present-day narrative except insofar as each tangential character converges in the present from their own origin point. The weakness of the thread tying it all together though shouldn't detract from Levy's writing, which delivers a lot of thoughtful social commentary with a lovely tongue-in-cheek sense of humour which is present throughout but only becomes overt late in the book around the denouement. Above all and in spite of its flaws this is most definitely a page-turner in the best sense, and offers an important and hitherto underrepresented snapshot of English colonialism.

2 Comments:

Blogger Daisy Mae said...

A couple here sound of interest - Ishiguro and Levy (Lou says have you never heard of the Brixton riots- Google it for more on racism in Britain in our lifetime).

January 3, 2019 at 6:44 PM  
Blogger Sean's Beard said...

I've heard of the Brixton riots, but never read any books that deal with it; the point is that most racist treatises in literary form seem to be American or post-colonial. There's touches of 'racism in England' in Zadie Smith, too, but it's not as overt as here.

January 3, 2019 at 11:58 PM  

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