Books of 2021 - All in One Again
Yes, it's extremely late again; the craziness of starting a new year and holidays has kept me back from this, coupled with the fact that I stole an extra book and needed to finish/write it up before I could post this, which task I finished a few days ago but then I needed to work out my order and edit my sometimes drunken, incoherent notes into proper writeups. But here it belatedly is.
I only got through 23 books this year, which is 7 fewer than last year's unprecedented disaster. The reasons for this are many and obvious, but the main reason I managed to get through 30 in 2020 was because about 18 of those were done in the first three months of that year when I was still commuting to North Sydney before lockdown hit; apart from that my reading pace in 2021 was probably on par but I had a shorter commute for less of the year and got bogged down a lot more. But anyway, there's still some books been read so here they are.
I was grateful to Bec for
‘surprising’ me with this book, since I find it hard to pick up Fitzgerald
under my own willpower. This book helps confirm for me what I’ve often thought
of him and his legacy: that he feels like a writer who has accidentally become
one of the most revered authors of his time, purely by virtue of being the only
one who chronicled that time. Instead of being exclusively set in the jazz age,
this bildungsroman takes place in the decades leading up to the roaring
twenties and our protagonist Amory Blaine’s time at a prestigious school and
then Princeton, trying to find his intellectual voice at the same time as
pursuing a meaningful love affair. Like Gatsby, there is an admirable evocation
of time and place here, and he does make 1910s Princeton feel like an
aspirational place to live and experience. But also like Gatsby and probably
more so, Fitzgerald is unable to conjure up even a vaguely likeable character,
or give me any reason why I should care for these pseudo-philosophy spouting
frat boys. Very sporadically he’ll put into somebody’s mouth or Amory’s
internal monologue a provocative aphorism, but Amory’s key defining
characteristic is his amorphous inability to create a form, a style or a
‘persona’ for himself. It is perhaps noteworthy that this book came out a few
years before Freud published “The Ego and the Id” since I feel Fitzgerald is
vaguely, and ineptly, swinging for similar kind of ideas in patching together
Amory’s quest for romance with his quest for identity, but it also just feels to be
coincidence that this was written while such psychological ideas were simply
growing in popularity. Ultimately the reason why I’d see this as a classic or
worthwhile is simply because I can’t think of another story set among this
specific social class in this specific era (it’s similar - but nowhere near as
witty or interesting - as the stuff Evelyn Waugh was writing across the pond),
so again Fitzgerald marks his place in literary history purely by being the guy who showed up and wrote about it.
I’ve really enjoyed a couple of
Mishima’s books in the past few years, and have found them very provocative and
challenging, bringing a radically different view of the world home in vivid
detail. This was the first of his that I’ve read since discovering that Mishima
was, in real life, an actual fascist and probable psychopath. That fact may have
coloured my reading here, but I struggled with this book more than I have with
others. The Sailor who Fell from Grace with the Sea (my #3 book of 2017) I feel had a curious blunt detachment, which made the
horrors of what went on in that story more affecting because they were so
matter-of-fact. This book by contrast has a deep POV intimacy to it, which
coupled with Mishima’s detached authorship and skewed perspective, felt quite
claustrophobic. It tells the story of a boy who discovers that he’s attracted
physically to other boys, especially a bigger classmate of his, and his
struggle to grapple with this feeling of being 'not normal'. As sad
and touching as this story is, I felt it mingled with some strange conceptions
that only Mishima could bring to the fore. For one thing, the narrator
has a concurrent thirsty blood lust, and longs for a glorious death in battle or in
anguish like pictures of suffering saints that he fetishises. I couldn’t help
but feel that Mishima was correlating the character’s homosexuality with
this fetishisation of pain and death, as if his sexual and
spiritual ‘abnormality’ as he sees it were part and parcel of the same thing.
He operates outside of normal society while desperately trying to fit in, to
hold his mask over his true desires in order to seem normal, which all feels like interesting fodder for a reader to mull over. The main trouble is that the first person perspective and his emotionally distant
style, combined with the anguish and despair of his narrator, felt like an
uncomfortable and stultified marriage of word and feeling. It’s verbose, it’s
somewhat over-intellectualised and it ended up leaving me cold, but without the
sheer shock and awe that his other works have also given me.
Got this one as part of an
overhaul of Catie’s library when they moved house, never having been especially
interested in it but also knowing the esteem it’s held in and mainly it was free. Having read it I
don’t really share the esteem. It’s easy to read, and the story is free-flowing
so it’s certainly an accessible book that also contains some dangerous and
provocative themes that can challenge people into thinking they’re reading
something deep and serious. But really I don’t think there’s anything profound
going on here. A lot of the storybeats feel like they're lifted straight from the Great
Gatsby and dropped into a modern setting (without the Gatsby-Daisy unrequited love and instead with a bickering
couple feeding each other’s bitterness), where Bruce 'Pikelet' Pike, our protagonist is Nick
and Sando is Gatsby, the enigmatic and aspirational figure with whom Nick/Pikelet
becomes entranced and fascinated. But therein lies the biggest problem in that,
like Nick, I found Pikelet such a snivelling, unsympathetic loser of a character
that I couldn’t find myself caught up in his psychology at all.
In this book, following his dalliance with Sando and his wife, rather than having necessarily clearly set up the prolepsis at the beginning of the story, there’s a quickfire
summary of “by the way here’s some more things that happened in my
life to make me the way I am now” and I didn’t really buy into a lot of the mental health issues he’s
purported to suffer from, since his conflicts throughout the book seemed fairly
pedestrian and run of the mill as far as adolescence goes. I’m not ultimately a
big surfing type so a lot of the technical side of the story was lost on
me, but I will say that as not part of that world, the surfing parts were the
most entertaining and where Winton excels in creating excitement and tension.
Where he fails (in this instance, for me at least) is in fleshing out
characters whose struggles and ambitions I shared and whose successes I wanted
to enjoy. And being such an intimate cast of four (give or take a few parents)
and a first person narrative, that’s quite pivotal to the story’s sticking the
landing.
I was excited to pick up this
book after really enjoying Swimming Home last year (#8 book of 2020). But honestly I found
myself quite frustrated in reading this. Swimming had a delightful
ambivalence in its attitude towards a lot of the characters, and this took on a
similar tone together with similar kinds of characters and situations. There’s
humour, in dissecting character hubris, and there’s ambiguity in psychology and
people grappling with past personal history and struggling to come to terms
with their own identity. But this novel seemed so on-the-nose and even
aggressive in its ambivalence. At some point the narrator Sofia
says in her monologue “I had wanted to be unseen and misunderstood” which
to me typifies the contradictions at the story’s heart. She as narrator, and
Levy as her author, deliberately obfuscates all of the relationships and even
some of the plot machinations, in service of some ambition of pursuing high art
via a story about a young adult girl coming to terms with her parents’
fallibility and vulnerabilities. I feel like the story on its own is engaging;
the narrative as it emerges though is ultimately cold and frustrating, as seen
through the eyes of a character who can only be described in those same terms - cold and frustrating - by those who come into contact with her. Ultimately in comparing this to Swimming
Home, I feel like both stories eschew empathy in favour of a psychological
ambiguity. But the humorous angle of Swimming was more prominent, and empathising
with characters was irrelevant to its success, whereas this felt like a more
emotional or heartfelt premise, and it needs that empathy to be successful.
As with anything from Henry James
(well, the one Henry James book I’ve read prior to this), the premise of this story is more engaging
than the execution. It tells the tale of Maisie, the offspring of a couple
going through an acrimonious divorce, who then becomes used as a hapless pawn
in the power plays and dramas of her two parents and their newfound
entanglements. There’s two rival governesses for her, one of whom forms a
romantic tryst with Maisie’s father and later forms an infatuation with
Maisie’s mother’s new inamorata. But then there's a series of inamoratas. So yeah it’s somewhat convoluted to begin with, but
James obfuscates it further with his flowery and very circumspect prose. It
became quite clumsy reading for example when Maisie and one of her manifold surrogate
parent figures would encounter a biological parent with a new companion and
James would refer to each of the characters in turns as “the
young lady”, “the worthwhile gentleman”, “the statuesque figurehead”, "the clandestine Lothario" etc where
straightforward and to-the-point descriptions would both clarify the action and, far more importantly, suffice. Most of the intrigue of the story centres around the question of
just how innocent Maisie is to what’s going on around her. At times she’ll make
some naive childish disclosure which is misinterpreted as some negative value
judgment, while all the while the adults around her are either deeply concerned
about the corruption of her innocence or slyly feigning concern about the
corruption of her innocence. With the central themes revolving around double
meanings, vague comprehensions and deliberate confoundment and deception, and
the plot generally being complex enough as it is, the dainty vagaries of James’
prose felt like too much on top of everything else and I feel a more efficient
writer (like a Hemingway) could have drawn some harder-hitting
dramatic impact from what should be quite a compelling narrative.
This was the other book I acquired from Catie during her move-related library cleanout, knowing nothing about it
except that it is the pun basis for the Simpsons episode Skinner’s Sense of
Snow. I found it an intriguing read but one that got heavily off the rails.
The early parts where Smilla is suspicious of her young friend Isaiah’s
“accidental” death falling off the roof of their building is the most engaging.
But what I found a bit problematic during this section was the sort of
preternatural instinct she had for tracing where things were amiss or not
right, and being able to manipulate people to her own ends. Through Høeg’s male
lens she's seen as this kind of superhero character and it hinted quite obviously that she was a key inspiration
behind Stieg Larsson’s Lisbeth Salander, and the more Høeg tried to work up her amazing
investigative abilities while also trying to enter her female interior from the
outside, the more male and perverse it felt to me. But partway through the book
(plot-wise there’s a fairly explosive incident that to me marks the turning
point) the plot also became very convoluted, and I started to lose track of which
characters were what, with what motivations. In some ways
that expands the scope of the book to be less about a murder investigation and
certainly less about Smilla and her feelings (for snow or otherwise), and more
about dangerous ambition and blind, wilful greed that compromises your own and
others' humanity. But the issue is that the book is drawn in extreme sharp focus
throughout, so the more branches stemmed out from the already complex plot, the more it began to drag. Meanwhile Smilla becomes more helpless and damsel-in-distress as she gets irrevocably entangled in this web of deceit and corruption, which makes her less interesting while remaining this idealised female cut-out written from a man's perspective. At this point I
started to feel that Steig Larsson may have been inspired to utilise some of Høeg’s
ideas but also to expand and simplify aspects of his own fierce heroine (to the
point where she became even more idolised, but also enjoyable in an escapist
kickass kind of way). My main issue in experiencing this book was simply that
the more convoluted the plot and cast of characters became, the less I cared
about what happened either in the story or to any of the people. The book
didn’t feel like it was building its tension so much as wringing every last
drop out slowly and tediously. The writing was always competent if a little
overly macho and even vulgarly sentimental at times, but the narrative flow felt byzantine and messy to me.
I do enjoy the fact that all of
Liu Cixin’s works are being translated now, but it’s a
double-edged sword because obviously not everything can be the Trisolaris
trilogy. This one’s an interesting bit of speculative fiction, imagining an
alliance that formed between dinosaurs and ants in the Cretaceous period whereby
ants are able to perform tiny, nimble tasks that the clumsy dinosaurs are
unable to, while dinosaurs are able to create and imagine new technologies
because their brains are much larger and more powerful than ants’. Liu tells it
all like a chronicle, sometimes jumping ahead many centuries in time to narrate
the most salient points in the history of the alliance (similarly to what he
does in Death’s End), and when we get involved with actual personalities
from the ant or dinosaur civilisation there’s a certain impersonal quality where
we don’t have a full understanding of character motivations beyond their
serviceability to the plot. But ultimately Liu’s purpose here is analogical,
and it’s a curiosity but it’s also fairly heavy-handed and on the nose. The dinosaurs being huge
massive creatures with voracious appetites are an obvious stand-in for the western consumerist superpowers, while the ants stand in for developing nations,
without whose efficient labour the big consumers of the west couldn’t subsist.
He also makes commentary on empiricism, cold war paranoia and finally a big
statement on climate change and the need for cooperation in order to survive.
As an analogy I feel it’s thoughtful if a little ham-fisted, and I also feel
the story here isn’t quite compelling enough on its own; like the characters it exists mainly to service his social commentary. Which isn’t a terrible
thing but it did get me bogged down a bit here (I read this in lockdown, and
frequently I just couldn’t be bothered picking it up again so this slowed my reading year more than any other book) when I already
felt I knew the story and there weren't any developments happening that I
couldn’t have conjured myself. Story wise it’s a pale comparison to the twists
and turns of the whole Trisolaris trilogy.
I think it’s sometimes too long
between culture novels from Banks for me, and this one in particular took me
a while to get back up to speed with the ‘world building’ done in previous
novels I’ve read. That wasn’t helped by the fact that the narrative is a bit
all over the place at first, with lots of characters in different places and
times, so the narrative took a while to get hold of as well. Banks spends a lot
of time generally in his culture novels, and I thought particularly in this
instance, writing long descriptions of historical events, or cultural norms and
traditions. I found it a structural quirk and failing of this book that he
spent a long time doing this but especially in the mature stages of the novel where I’d
gotten a handle on the plot and I was more impatient to find out what happens
next. They felt like lengthy “by the way” asides that didn’t quite fit.
Normally I’d chalk it up to authorial idiosyncrasy and simply a quirk, but it
bothered me more by the ending, which I found really clunkily done. The climax
of the story happened very abruptly and left way too many loose ends
lying around. Those loose ends Banks then proceeds to tie up in a sequence of coda
passages which could all start with “I bet you’re wondering what happened to
[BLANK], eh?” so ultimately I felt he should have focused less on these
background exposition asides and more on tying those loose ends closer together
ahead of the climax, to make the climax more substantial and compelling as a
result. In the end it felt like a few stylistic choices by the writer were more
in service of his larger ‘vision’ of the Culture and less in service of this
story. So back to my original point, probably a more minor quibble if I were
more immersed in the series, but as a standalone novel it felt weaker as a
result.
This was one that Bec got for me
from the library when I told her to surprise me. And it was a particularly apt
surprise from her (a propos of very little) given that I read my first
Fitzgerald book last year and it made my top ten (At Freddie's, #9 of 2020). This was, to be honest, a
less enjoyable book. It had a similar cast of ambiguous and even intractable
characters all conflicted internally, and externally set against a backdrop of
a battleground on artistic value and cultural relevance. Our protagonist Florence decides to set up a bookshop in a
tiny coastal tourist town without much business acumen or long-term business
plan, and comes into conflict with the town dowager who had her own plans to
establish a cultural centre on the same premises. The conflict between these two is
the central plot hinge here and it’s the main reason I didn’t quite appreciate
this book. There’s a very bitter tone to a lot of the
rivalry, but I don’t think Fitzgerald did a great job of establishing why the
antipathy was so intense or why it escalated as quickly as it does. In particular I didn’t
find Mrs Gamart (the dowager) an unreasonable or malicious character until the ending, so
she didn’t really seem like such a believable villain except that Florence
opposed and antagonised her at every turn. Similarly, I found Florence’s own
intransigence and headstrong nature a little intractable, mainly just that I
didn’t get a good sense of her own psychology except that she’s a bit
capricious and ultimately too scatter-brained to make this bookshop work. I
feel like I was meant to feel more pathos and even bitter poignancy by the
denouement, but I found the story a bit of a diversion only, where I ultimately
didn’t have much of a stake in the characters or the story. It was entertainingly
told but left me feeling unfulfilled.
This book was partially
recommended to me by an old colleague I think, but anyway when I came across it
in the library my curiosity got the better of me despite being mixed on McBride's Women's fiction prize winner A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing (My #30 book of 2017). This is quite similar, stylistically; it’s ambiguous to the
point of being obtuse, but always having the sense of having a greater dramatic
point waiting in the wings. Here the whole story takes the form of a series of
stream of consciousness encounters in hotels in various cities around the
world. The chronology is not exactly clear as we go on but it feels to be going
back in time or at least the consciousness stream we’re privy to takes us
closer and closer as we go on to the heart of what is making this woman
globetrot the way she is: what is she running from, if anything? The conclusion
as I read it seems to be that it doesn’t matter because we’re all running from
something in some way, and while she has her story it seems to go the same way
wherever she is and whoever she meets. Yes most of her encounters are with interloping men who want 'the usual' from her, but it’s a universal feeling of
being lost in a world that’s moving too fast to keep up with. At least that’s
what I got from McBride’s writing, which in this third novel of hers is fairly elusive but still intriguing. It’s a short but effective and
thought-provoking bit of writing.
McEwan seems to be continuing
here with the riffing on classic works he began in Nutshell (my #18 book of 2017); I haven’t read Machines Like Me, the book published between it and this. In this case he
takes Kafka’s Metamorphosis as his starting platform, only instead of a human
finding himself suddenly transformed into a cockroach, McEwan has a cockroach
wake up one morning suddenly transformed into a human. But from that leaping
off platform, McEwan works it into a really rather obvious and somewhat
simplistic satire of Brexit and the Trump era, with the cockroach’s newfound
form that of the British PM during a political crisis on whether to proceed or
not with a bizarre economic revolution called “Reversalism” designed to
literally reverse the flow of money through the economy. The story only
patchily reverts back to the Kafkaesque premise, but otherwise plays out like an
unimaginative episode of Yes Prime Minister, and McEwan’s opinion on Brexit is
left indelibly plain on the page (although I agree with it, it could be done in a more clever way). I think the clear central idea here - that the
current political climate is playing out as if it were run by giant cockroaches
- is a little too on the nose for me, while the political drama is all dealt
with rather glibly, although I feel that part of the reason is McEwan wanted to
restrict himself to <100 pages as a challenge to mirror Kafka's original
precisely. I think a more interesting interpretation of what McEwan is
attempting here is to suggest that the discombobulation of the individual
consciousness that Kafka was exploring one hundred years prior is now part of
the collective consciousness, that we find ourselves somehow part of some giant
cockroach mechanism that we can’t control and have no idea how we got here. But
that interpretation I feel requires some effort and reader agency, and is not explored
explicitly or effectively enough to drive such a point home. As with all of his
works, there’s definitely merit and potential in the idea and the story but I
feel the execution here lets him down and limits him somewhat in diving deeper
into those themes.
This is the book I snuck into my 2021 reading despite it all being read in
2022, mainly because I just devoured this in a few days and I hadn’t yet
written up notes for the last two books I actually read in 2021. I picked
this up in my library to up my quota of women writers even though I was a bit
lukewarm on the idea of this novel when it came out, since the Handmaid’s Tale is one of
those untouchable works that one shouldn’t attempt to add to or improve. But
having read this now I feel like I was both right but at the same time,
Atwood can still have the right to do it and only she could pull it off. I
don’t feel like she quite pulled it off here, even though rather than necessarily trying to recreate the original's magic, she's just expanding the Gilead universe that she explored in only a limited way previously. She
narrates three stories here from different perspectives: there’s the story
of a young girl raised in the ‘outside’ world, there’s a parallel
story of a young girl raised within the inner privileged society of Gilead elite and facing the future prospect of a
marriage to further the cause, and there’s the first person memoir of one of
the ‘aunts’ in charge of indoctrination of the girls within Gilead but who is
secretly plotting to bring down and expose the crimes of the republic from
within. What it then becomes is twofold: firstly it’s a kind of buffet of tales
within the universe Atwood created, but it's also set within the framework of
an espionage narrative where we see the different players who are going to
enact this plot and we’re hoping they can each do what’s needed against the
odds to destroy the evil regime. In that sense it's quite a
compelling page-turner, and of course Atwood is as skilled a storyteller as has
ever lived, but there are various ways in which I feel this pales quite meekly
in the shadow of its gargantuan predecessor (gargantuan in terms of themes and inventiveness; length-wise this is about double the length). Firstly, The Handmaid’s Tale is such a monumental piece of
literature largely due to its prescience: although its dystopian satire was
possibly topical and even obvious at the time (I’m no 80s cultural historian so I won't be hagiographic about it) but it's become more culturally relevant and topical as the
years have gone on. This book, reading it more contemporaneously, feels quite
reactive, and some of the more explicit points Atwood makes
here feel a bit too obvious. So my point is that maybe some of these satirical
points and critiques will become more pointed in the future, but it’s not really
saying anything brilliantly that Handmaid didn’t already, and it being written now
feels like belabouring a lot of the same points after the fact
- when Gilead is of course feeling more and more inevitable. So maybe a
worthwhile endeavour but also a somewhat redundant one. While I did enjoy
her contrasting of the inside and outside world, and very much liked the
revision of Aunt Lydia as the Trojan horse of sorts, I didn’t buy some of
the plot points here. I feel like I missed Agnes’ - the girl raised
under Gilead rule - transition from an insider who's merely curious about alternative ways of
living to the point where she’s poised to rebel upon being faced with marriage.
Obviously as readers we are supposed to see the inevitability in this transition since this kind of forced marriage seems like a vile concept, but her own fealty to her duty never
seems to be shaken even while she starts to uncover the corruption at Gilead's core. Her disgust at the prospect of marriage felt like it was jumped at quite
quickly and not led to by her own first-person narrative and only made any sense
because I, as reader, share her sensibilities. In some ways those are just
quibbles and imperfections, but I feel the most eye-rolling transgression here is that
Atwood again concludes this book with an epilogue, set far in the post-Gilead
future at an academic symposium on the topic of 'Gileadean studies'. In the first book the epilogue is a stroke of brilliant ingenuity. It
recontextualises the narrative we’ve just read through, places it under an
unreliable narrator lens, but also frames the whole thing as a case of - as
Audre Lord referred to - using the 'master’s tools' to dismantle the house. In
its case the fact that Offred used words - and the forbidden recording of words
- to expose the truths at the heart of the regime, to demonstrate for posterity
that the subjugated had a voice. Meanwhile the academic interrogation of her words in
the epilogue take on a masterfully satirical bent and add to the ambiguity of the story, as they lightheartedly pull
apart the nuts and bolts of the drama we’ve just lived through. What that means though is that future and its inevitability is already part of the context of this book (and the labelling of the chapters makes this clear enough anyway), so not only do we need that
framing device at its conclusion, we already understand and enjoy the ambiguity of the narration throughout and this epilogue’s tone feels glib and mawkish. It really could and should have been dispensed with; in which case I would
have enjoyed this much more as an entertaining and engaging dip back into the rich, deep waters Atwood had explored so effectively
before.
I have a bit of an ambivalent
relationship with Todd Haynes’ film adaptation of this book. I haven’t seen it,
but I really wanted to and then I found out that Bec had watched it without me one day
so I still haven’t seen it and now I'm stubbornly refusing to watch it even though Bec's offered to rewatch because I'm still mad that she'd watch it without me. So naturally I picked up the source
material instead so I can experience it without having to back down in my childish vendetta. I didn’t actually know prior to seeing this book on a shelf that the film was adapted from a Patricia Highsmith novel, an author I’ve also never read but - again with film adaptations - I love Anthony Minghella’s
1999 adaptation of The Talented Mr Ripley so I felt this might be a good place to start with her. The
reason why I have such a long preamble about the film adaptation I haven’t
seen, and another Highsmith novel I haven’t read but have seen the film adaptation, is because I honestly didn’t
love this, but I feel a film adaptation would go a long way to strengthening its emotional resonance. The main issue is that I found this quite boring
for the entire first half of it, where Therese is figuring out the nature of
both her feelings for Carol and the reciprocity thereof. In a lot of ways (and knowing
Highsmith’s almost symbiotic artistic relationship with Hitchcock) it reminded me of a Hitchcock film, in that
there’s an enormous patience taken with setting the scene and establishing the
characters and their motivations before any actual action takes place. In watching a
film I tend to find this kind of deliberate pacing worthwhile, and I can only imagine how well Todd
Haynes (as a sidenote: no better filmmaker in my opinion to adapt this)
captures the yearning, the uncertainty of Therese in visual form. But in the book
it felt like so much kept going on but without anything happening; not
unnecessary detail but more long and inefficient storytelling, and
something that a film could capture more economically with a good score and an actress like Rooney Mara than so
much exposition. Once Carol and Therese embark on their cross-country journey and it takes on
many more familiar Highsmith-esque themes of suspicion and intrigue and
high-stakes decision making, it was quite compelling (like the difference
between the first and second halves of Psycho, for instance) and I was very
much caught up in the drama. It felt like an interminable ascent to the peak of
a rollercoaster before an exciting ride down. But the thing about that drawn-out introduction to the real conflict here is it makes me question whether I’d actually enjoy reading more Highsmith. I feel like Minghella
did so much with Ripley that may well have been cinematic invention: those longing
looks of Matt Damon at Jude Law, the audacity of Philip Seymour Hoffman’s performance as Freddy,
the scenery and the music, it’s all very effective in cinema but might be hard
to capture that same experience in prosaic form. So an excellent story, told effectively but I feel
with far more exposition than was needed.
This one I picked up as part of redressing a phallocentric run of books I'd had, and for no other reason and knowing
nothing else about it. For a long time I felt like this book was ready to crash
and burn, for a key reason that Soffer lays out some fairly obvious plot
trajectories and the points to get there very early on. It tells two parallel
stories: of teenage girl Lorca, prone to self-harm and desperately seeking
validation from her cold, distant mother; and of septuagenarian (?) Iraqi refugee
Victoria who is caring for her infirm husband Joseph. With the two destined to
meet, it became a question of: will the author take the obvious route?
How long will it take? Will she hit all the obvious landmarks along the way?
There were, though, a couple of bifurcations she could take with those plot
points and, as it happens, she makes all the right moves so the narrative ends
up neither as predictable nor as schmaltzy as I’d feared. There is certainly a
touch of soap opera about it as our characters find new meaning in life from
each other, but Soffer to her credit gives the reader enough respect to
understand that the easy route through this plot is also the least satisfying. She also writes with an immense level of empathy and humanity, so the
redemptive arc of sorts that the story offers is believable and effective. I
did find some of the interiority of the story claustrophobic at times, in that
the characters in their first person narratives could tread the same ground a
bit too much and I wanted the gears of the story to start grinding again. That
feeling notwithstanding, the people she depicts here are living, breathing
creatures and I was successfully caught up in their dilemmas and dramas
throughout.
One thing I tend to dislike about
“adaptation” editions of novels like this is it’s hard to separate the actors
from the characters when they’re well-known. In this case, it was difficult to read
the words of the titular night manager Jonathan Pine without
hearing Tom Hiddleston’s voice. But conversely it was hard to even imagine the
antagonist, a character frequently referred to in the book as “the worst man in
the world” being played by mild-mannered and multi-talented comedian of my
childhood Hugh Laurie. But anyway, plot wise this feels similar to other
LeCarrés that I’ve read, except here the intrigue often revolves around the ambiguously
unimpeachable title character, who’s recruited by a special ops team to try and
infiltrate the antagonist’s international smuggling operation by being a
trusted quantity with nothing to lose. LeCarré takes us at turns through Pine’s
travails working through his operation on the ground, and through the corridors
of Whitehall as the people pulling his strings try to maintain control and keep
abreast of developments. At first these latter were hard to follow as there
were too many different players and a layer of espionage bureaucracy wrapped
around it from LeCarré’s more intimate knowledge of the machinations involved.
But by the end, when Pine’s cover starts to become thinner and possibly
compromised, his side of the story became more predictable and it was the
movements and plays being pulled behind the scenes on Whitehall that became
more intriguing. I guess that’s the sign of a good storyteller in that LeCarré
knew when to pull focus away from the story when we know where it’s heading. In
truth though I found some plot points a little unbelievable here, such as Pine’s
ability to keep contact with his masters so effortlessly and undetected while
on the bad guy’s private island. Moreover the denouement was a little
unsatisfying (by design) in that the operation not only is unsuccessful but it
was always doomed to fail since it relied too much on international diplomacy
and cooperation that was never going to be sustained. Therefore the final
conclusion of the story becomes less about the spy mission and more about that
afore-mentioned unimpeachable character of Pine and how he upholds himself to
the end as pure and innocent. In some ways it’s possibly an amusing subversion of his
own genre by LeCarré and maybe I need more familiarity with those conventional
endings to fully appreciate this. But it felt like a bit of a frustrating
fairytale where our hero survives even though the world continues to be shit
and run by shitheads.
Does it count as my one Dickens a
year if it's his unfinished manuscript and therefore not a complete book?
Given it’s longer in its present state than A Christmas Carol (#10 of 2020) was last year,
I’ll count it. But frustrating as this book is just by virtue of being unfinished,
that frustration is compounded by the fact that this is a really compelling
read. It’s classic Dickens in the sense that sympathies with characters are
abundantly clear even though circumstances dictate varying fortunes for those
characters. Here he draws out a great deal of ambiguity in those figures
though, with the titular Edwin being a man smiled on by fortune but
nevertheless unable to revel in his luck. His betrothal to the beautiful Rosa
is unhappy and there seems to be some kind of mysterious cloud hanging over
him, whose nature we never learn because the author selfishly died and shit. Meanwhile the
luckless figure of Neville holds our sympathies as somebody who sticks to the
courage of his convictions despite the perils of society constantly working
against him. The ‘mystery’ of the title never really gets fully fleshed out in
the fragment we have, although there are distinct suspicions held by the town
and various clues as to what may have befallen Edwin, though none of the
theories that are expounded in the introduction to this edition hold water to my mind, and I believe
Dickens was working on a far more byzantine plot than would afford any simple
explanations. The fact is that this tome sits at around 200 odd pages, and my
sense was very clear that he was building this towards twice that length or
more. There’s a lot of machinations introduced towards the cutoff mark,
and my sense was that we were only just getting revved up. All of which makes
for a thoroughly entertaining and satisfying read while it lasts, but a
bittersweet cliffhanger to be abandoned with.
I love the way Baldwin writes. His
voice is so authentically but also somehow accidentally natural, like he can’t
help but disappear behind the voice of his characters. The story here is
probably better known to people who managed to find time to watch Barry
Jenkins’ film adaptation, but in essence our main protagonist Clementine falls pregnant
with her boyfriend’s baby shortly after he is imprisoned for a rape he didn’t
commit. The family has to try and get him out of prison before the baby comes.
The rest of the story and its background is told in flashbacks and there’s an
excellent interior monologue running throughout this all from the point of view
of Clementine. I found the book oddly uplifting in its portrayal of a family
bond growing closer in the face of adversity and opposition, but naturally the
events and stories and characters are all quite tragic in their essence. I
thought the ending was oddly ambiguous, which bothered me a bit not because I
expected a big happy ending but more because I hoped Baldwin might have more to say, instead
of cutting it off so abruptly and even with so little commentary (even though that's not his style). The language throughout is moving though, so
even if some story points didn’t quite cut through the reading experience was deeply engaging.
This was a really engaging and
entertaining read, but I felt like it went off the deep end in a way fitting to its
protagonist. Allie Fox is an iconoclastic and hubristic ingenue who, tired of
the malaise of life in Massachusetts, packs up his family of six and heads out
on a ship bound for Honduras to start a new life. His quest and the subsequent
crusade to bring ice to an isolated part of the coast is all told through the
eyes of his 14-year-old son Charlie who views his father with a mixture of
fear, respect and god-like awe. Allie’s force of personality is both the
driving force of the novel and the chief reason why it’s engaging, as his obsessive
nature is simultaneously admired, puzzled over and even mocked by Charlie’s
narrator and the Honduran locals around him. The relationship between Allie and
his supportive but tragically enabling wife reminded me a lot of the parents in
Jeanette Walls’ The Glass Castle but with a big dose of Fitzcarraldo thrown
in as well, as Allie’s steadfast, iron-willed determination along with his
strangely mercurial charisma has a big Klaus Kinski vibe to
it. Where I think the novel fell off is in the final section, when a huge
disaster befalls Allie’s man-made paradise and he is forced to confront his own
imperfections and mortality. I honestly felt like the novel could have ended
there in a poignant and satisfying conclusion, but instead Allie picks himself up
and drags his family through an increasingly paranoid and deluded series of
disconnected misadventures by travelling upriver on a motor-powered houseboat.
What made him so compelling as a character was the ambivalent nature of his
relationship with his family and the people around him and their uncertainty
about whether to admire or fear or scorn him, and his unnatural ability to defy
the odds and work nature to his favour. When that force of character devolves
into paranoia and conspiracy, the subtlety of the man and his exploits
likewise devolves and we’re left with a ranting Aguirre on a raft overrun with
monkeys. I feel like Theroux gets too caught up in some desire for comeuppance
or to let Allie’s hubris burn itself out and he drags him, his family and the
reader too far through the mud for it to have any sting left by the end. I was
exhilarated at the conclusion of the second part where I felt it could have
ended, but exhausted by the actual end of the novel and Allie’s journey.
This was the other one - along with the Jessica Soffer and Margaret Atwood - because I'd been reading a series of male-penned books and this happened not to be, but I
knew nothing else about it. Turns out it was a good decision. This takes the
form of a series of short stories (13 of them, i guess) taken in chronological order throughout
the life of Elizabeth/Liz/Lizzie. All told, it’s almost like a bildungsroman in
vignette form, focused around her body image issues firstly as a fat young girl and
later as a former fat girl after she’s dieted and worked hard to get into a
body that she and - ostensibly - her loved ones can be proud of. Awad is concerned through in asking probing and provocative questions about body image and society’s
obsession with the female form, but is content with asking those questions and offers no easy answers. Despite its themes, this isn’t really a book about body positivity,
although it certainly leans in a direction that is anti-body shaming, and it manages to tread that line of ambiguity with a great deal of humour, irony and pathos. Elizabeth
is an incredibly neurotic character, but she’s neurotic without being insufferable
or unsympathetic. Possibly it helps that we see her perspective at various
points in her life and various points in her transformations, while other
voices around her are adopted as narrators for stories as well so we can examine
her life from multiple angles. It’s at turns savagely biting and funny, other
times poignant and whistful, while always being brutally honest and
thought-provoking.
This feels like the most
enjoyable Rushdie I’ve read for a while, possibly going back as far as Shalimar the Clown which I read prior to all these annual writeups - in 2005. Not
to say he hasn’t written good ones in the intervening years, but I’ve often
felt a bit like their ambition outstripped the content. For this book, Rushdie
takes the 1001 Arabian Nights as his inspiration but more generally looks to
the world of fairytales to construct his own modern fairytale, set in the
corruption of a near-future world resembling our own and against the backdrop
of tribalist politics and evangelical trutherism. The central character is
Dunia, a jinn from the fairy world who visits the world of humans and falls in
love in the middle ages with a rationalist philosopher, and with him she begets
a race of half-human half-jinn creatures who resemble humans but have dormant
magic powers. There’s some supernatural doings with other jinns and a rival theocratic philosopher, then a war waged on earth by a team of fallen
jinnia who exploit religious fanaticism to enslave mankind in a climate of
fear. The outlandish, fantastical nature of this story is where its strength
lies, since Rushdie abandons his ambitions to interweave heavy social
commentary and philosophical teachings, and instead lets those same ideas
emerge organically from the machinations of the story. He can’t help himself on
occasion, with a really obvious dig at Trump (which feels
anachronistic and irrelevant in this setting) but for the most part the world
he creates here is recognisable without that resemblance being too heavy-handed
to incorporate the fantastical. It feels like an amusing diversion and
entertainment for which I’m grateful, yet without it being something shallow
and insubstantial where you can’t extract thoughtfulness and reflection on the
human condition or the necessity of yearning for a higher purpose. It’s
satisfying and well crafted, and with less of the pretensions to undercut and
rewrite all modern philosophy that’s dogged some of Rushdie’s more recent
works, to my mind.
This book took a while to get my
head around, jumping as it does scene-to-scene between four different time
periods and four different settings, but once I did understand what the premise
of each time and place was, I enjoyed it a lot. It’s still an ambiguous read
for sure, in that Colchester doesn’t expend a lot of effort on explication of
character intentions, so it’s still quite a challenging read but I found it rich and rewarding. Essentially it tells the story of four generations of
mothers and daughters: beginning with the splendid and luminary Caresse, a
mainstay of the elite social scene of the 1920s, then Caresse's daughter Diana who envies
her mother’s beauty and social standing and longs to be part of that scene
herself (for better or worse); followed by Diana’s daughter Elena (and other daughter Leonie later in
the piece) who is trying to break the cycle of social ambition and forge a more
meaningful and emotionally fulfilling relationship both with her mother and her
own young daughter Bay. The efficient ambiguity with which Colchester writes
allows room for quite a lot of reflection in the reader, and the major theme
that isn’t really explored overtly is the concept of abuse and neglect and how
much this really extends to the mother-daughter relationships portrayed. Nobody
is seen as overtly abusive (although neglect certainly plays a role) but it’s
also clear that both Caresse and Diana resent the burden and responsibility of
motherhood, which instills in their successive daughters various reactions and
insecurities that are played out over the course of the book. The dichotomy
that Colchester presents is the idea of a woman and a mother as two distinct
identities that can’t be reconciled - at least in the early generations, and Elena
emerges as the emotional protagonist of the story who is wrestling
directly with that question. It’s not often really that I finish a book feeling
like I have some questions unanswered yet still feeling like the reading
experience was valuable, and even contemplating a second reading to get a
deeper understanding, but I did here. I won’t reread (who has time for that), and it could definitely be seen as a shortcoming
of the book that it did maintain an elusive psychology throughout, but I
nevertheless was deeply engaged throughout the story.
I picked up this book early in the
year at Abbey’s when I worked opposite it, and left it dormant in a bag for a
long time until lockdown reminded me I had it. I enjoyed Kadare’s The General of
the Dead Army (enough that it was my #9 book of 2019) so thought it was worth reading more about Albania through his
eyes. And this was indeed another deeply rewarding read. It tells a bit of a
saga of a small town in Albania during World War II; the protagonist is a
young boy of unspecified age (from his interactions one might put him anywhere between 8 and 12, old enough to see everything that goes on in the world but young enough
not to understand it fully). His innocent gaze and faithful paraphrasing of the
grownups around him infect the town and its people with a magical childlike
wonder, while the town loses its innocence around him. It begins with air
raids, where his house and its cellar is chosen by the authorities as a
suitable air raid shelter (which achievement he holds as a bragging right over
his best friend whose house is not chosen). The town undergoes a cavalcade of warring, swapping
sides, as the Italian forces march in and bring with them prostitution
and fascism. Then the Italians retreat as the Greek army advances to take over
the town themselves. The Italians return. The Greeks beat them back. All the
while the ladies of the town wring their hands and gossip, concerned about evil
spirits and sinful behaviour. Like The General of the Dead Army, this book feels like a song of
praise to Albania, while also being a warts-and-all portrait of its chequered
history and the isolation that goes with being a curtained state. It also brings to
mind similar stories of modern forces and their clash with traditional, pastoral
simplicity like Halldor Laxness’ Independent People or Pedro Almodóvar’s delightful film
Volver. But of course the central pivot is the fact that the narrator here is
an unreliable innocent: he sees all the destruction, death and chaos and
processes it all through unblemished eyes, and Kadare conjures up both poignant
beauty and inescapable tragedy from that unassuming but strangely omniscient
gaze.
I may have a little difficulty in expressing my love for this book, and reasons why it's at #1, because my notes that I wrote up at the time were full of unfinished sentences and ended with the caveat "I was drunk when I wrote this, please disregard if it's bonsense". But I did find this a very involving
and moving book, and it took me by surprise because while I appreciated Kingsolver's bestselling The Poisonwood Bible (my #27 book of 2016) and her Women's fiction prize-winning The Lacuna (#30 of 2015), they had a certain academic self-indulgence that lost traction with me, and in many ways my picking this book up felt like giving her one last chance to impress me. It tells the story
of Willa, a mother of two grown-up children who has settled herself down for an easy
retirement of leisure but life and its pitfalls shatter this dream when her daughter-in-law kills herself and Willa is forced to care for her infant granddaughter as well as her now-traumatised son. In parallel Kingsolver tells the tale of an aspiring science teacher Thatcher Greenwood, 150
years earlier, who lived in the same area when it was a planned community run by a kind of religious cult figure. By marrying the two narratives the author weaves two fascinating family sagas around a fable of modern psychology: of easy falsehoods that allow us to hope vs uncomfortable truths that are difficult to face but ultimately unavoidable. At the heart of it also lies an intriguing exploration of the dichotomy intrinsic in the title word unsheltered,
and how the lack of shelter can invoke both freedom to wander and life-threatening peril.
I feel the key strength of this book is how relatable and likeable both Willa
and Greenwood are; they feel like real people that Kingsolver has dreamed onto the
page, and as such the dilemmas of both of them as they confront 19th
century religious zealotry and 21st century anti-truth Trumpism (which she aptly
shows share a direct lineage) weave an intriguing story of hardship: how our struggle today to provide shelter in an inequitable society echoes the fundamental human need to believe in a higher purpose and how this struggle dogs both religious and
secular folks.
So that's that. I'm hoping that 2022 will reverse this downward trajectory of books read, but it's the 20th of January and I'm only halfway through book 1 of the year. So best of luck, me, with all of that.
posted by Sean's Beard at 2:41 AM
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