Books of 2022 Part 1: 30-21

 I set myself a task this year of arresting the downward trend in the number of books I was reading, and whooo I managed to do it quite comprehensively. Enough so that it makes sense to move this annual tradition back to the old yearly custom of breaking it up into chunks instead of doing them all in one countdown post. So as a reminder of how I do them traditionally: since the most fun posts are the books I really hated and the books I really loved, I start in the middle so the first post - the one you're reading - is counting down from 30-21. Tomorrow I'll countdown again just to number 11. Then the following day I jump back up and will countUP my bottom 11, from 31-41. Then my top 10 will follow that. So let's plunge in, starting with...

30) The Spirit of Science-Fiction - Roberto Bolaño

Bolaño, like Cixin Liu, is one of those authors from whom I’ll find progressively more new books to read as they steadily get translated into English. This one, frankly like I think every single one of his books I’ve read besides his short story collection The Insufferable Gaucho, centres around a group of young poets or writers leading a Bohemian lifestyle in the city - in this case, Mexico city. Remo, our narrator, and his friend Jan (ostensibly a stand-in for Bolaño himself) have an upbeat and optimistic view of Mexico City as a friendly city of dreams where a poet can find all the inspiration and intrigue he’d ever need. Their exuberance is quite infectious, which along with Bolaño’s quirky observations of life, make this readable enough in spite of its confused focus. There is a chronological story here, but it’s interspersed with scenes of dialogue between an older Remo and a reporter once he has been successfully published, and letters that Jan writes to science fiction luminaries of the USA (Le Guin, Bester, etc). I didn’t really see the point of Jan’s letters, nor for that matter the title of the book itself, nor did I really get the flash-forward sequences of dialogue unless they were some kind of finishing line we were supposed to imagine. None of it was framed especially well and little of it concluded especially well either. Remo and his friend Jose Arco’s quest to investigate the veracity of a statement that there were thousands of poetry and literary journals being published in Mexico City (despite rising illiteracy) also came to virtually no conclusion at all despite being the most consistent plot point throughout. Nevertheless, the book feels less interested in plot and more about interactions between characters, and in particular the love affair between Remo and - not Laura the girl he has an actual love affair with - the city itself, getting himself lost and caught up in its life and nightlife in particular, and Bolaño infects it all with a bright-eyed spirit that makes the ride entertaining even if it’s directionless.

29) His Favorites - Kate Walbert

Bec got me this one from the library following my request to get “short books, and/or books by women” and hey presto, this is both. This is a bit of an odd one, structurally, and narratorially, as it switches around in quite a haphazard way. I feel like a question that one can ask of any narrative is “why is it being written” in the world of the book, and especially a first-person narrator. It’s a question that’s very pertinent in Atwood’s Gilead novels for example, and it’s one that is explicitly answered here, late in the book. But I’d put that question to anybody looking to read this because I feel it helps make sense of the narrative as you go through, or rather it put a lot of it in a different perspective once it was answered. I don’t know if that’s therefore a spoiler or spoils the experience as Walbert intended, but I found it a bit hard when reading this to get a sense of who the narrator was, what her psychology was and what she was intending to convey with the random jumping back and forth in time with no real logical flow. But that question does frame it more interestingly, as it feels more like she’s trying to make sense of her own rambling and wandering thoughts, largely due to the traumatic events she’s describing. I guess the structure that I found weird and discombobulating at times serves the purpose better than the writing itself does, since it feels like a laissez-faire account of no particular account until that framing device puts her disconnected thoughts into sharper focus. It works less well as a story and better as an introspective character study, and I feel like I’d get more out of a second reading but also more out of a first reading if I’d interrogated the structure as I went through rather than expecting the story to coalesce.

28) Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire - J K Rowling

I’ve had this on my to-read list for a good many years after getting through Prisoner of Azkaban back in whenever. I finally discovered that there’s a “youth” section in my local library I never knew existed that contained all of these books and will probably give me a chance to read Twilight too, which I’m curious about but would never pay for in the same way that I don’t feel the need to add to J K Rowling’s nonsense hysteria fund. So yeah, as the biggest undertaking in the series so far I found this did drag a bit at times. There’s almost nothing I could say about this book that people don’t already know of course, but I found a lot of the teen angst stuff with the Yule ball a bit on the nose, and there’s some annoying character decisions throughout that felt a bit frustrating. They’re meant to be, of course (such as Harry consistently putting off trying to work out his golden egg clue because he’s “got ages to figure it out”), but some of them rang a bit false, in the sense that I wasn’t really convinced the character would really act that way except that it was necessary for the plot. The most egregious, naturally, is both times Harry manages to escape the clutches of the villains at the end of the piece, not because he’s brilliant but because the villains take a ridiculously long time to explain the plot to the reader urrh I mean Harry, and then give him every chance to fight back or someone else to rescue him. The first instance at least Rowling gives a good reason for it, in that he’s testing his own power against Harry’s as a demonstration to himself as much as everybody else, but the second is really quite unnecessary when his ultimate goal is to kill Harry rather than sit and explain how brilliant he is. But those niggles aside, it’s undoubtedly entertaining stuff even if I found some of it a bit too “tell me rather than show me” and other parts a bit cringey. I get it, I’m too old to be the target audience anymore and teenagers need to have everything spelled out because they’re stupid. I enjoyed it but wouldn’t really change my life for it. I’d also say for myself that I still prefer Azkaban out of the four I’ve read.

27) Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth - Xialo Guo

I picked up this book randomly basically because I’d picked up at the same time a bunch of bloke-written books so I felt I needed to fix the gender imbalance (yes I know that seems to be a mantra, but it’s just so easy to find a bunch of books by blokes I’ve already heard of). It was an interesting read, but at the same time not one I loved. It was mainly interesting just because it gave a perspective not often represented, that of a young woman from the provinces who moves to Beijing to try and make a life for herself. Her perspective is one of a woman who yearns to be independent, both personally and financially, but struggles with the competitiveness that comes from such a dense population and from a hangover community mindset that’s both collective and misogynistic among people who sometimes question women who stand and live for themselves. She is, however, a fairly incorrigible and misanthropic presence to spend time with. A big part of that comes from her circumstances, both the troubles she encounters and the fact that she’s just unhappy with her lot in life while also being unsure about what she really wants. Her being somewhat unpleasant is not, of course, a deal breaker, but because the whole thing is first-person perspective and, as the title suggests, fragmented, she becomes a somewhat unreliable source of information about her own life. Her narrative is self-centred but without a great depth of interiority, and her tone is plaintive without any great sense of needs or yearning or loss and certainly not what could be done about the situation. As a result, the book becomes mostly negative in tone and all in little skits so with no great direction for the future. It does have notes of hopefulness towards the end but the hope feels a bit elusive, and the trajectory of the book feels a bit cluttered and noisy like the city in which it’s set.

26) Frolic of the Beasts - Yukio Mishima

After struggling through Confessions of a Mask last year, I wasn't sure if I would ever read another Mishima (and I've already read and loved his best-known work anyway so any peripheral reading really feels like Mishima fan-service, which I'm not sure I'm that capable of anymore). Nevertheless, I came across this book in a bookshop in Launceston when I was about to finish another book, so I snapped it up to at least read on the plane home. And this certainly engaged me more consistently than his Confessions did, if only because it was shorter and the story more succinctly drawn out. The premise is also quite intriguing to keep you reading: it tells of a love triangle between a young student who is in love with the wife of an established lecturer on literature, the latter of whom has frequent and open affairs. There is a violent incident at the beginning of part I, and part II deals with the long aftermath years after the incident and where the love triangle still exists but in a different form. I found from reading the translator's note that Mishima uses Noh theatre as his inspiration here, and without knowing much about Noh theatre or the specific play he's satirising, the theatrical influence is very obvious from reading. There is a tight cast of characters, and a lot of the psychology and motivations are revealed through dialogue; there is even a subplot that doesn't at all factor into the main story but parallels it in thematic ways. In Mishima's typical fashion, the dialogue between the characters often tends to be conspicuously ambivalent with the psychology we get from the omniscient narration about the characters themselves. Of course extending the Noh theatre narrative, the implication is that the literal masks the characters wear often hide their true motivations, or their words may reveal their true motivations at odds with what the mask shows (it's not lost on me that I'm talking much more about masks here than I did in my writeup of Confessions of a Mask, mainly because with that book I had far more issues). There remains Mishima's characteristic savagery, his vision of human beings as inherently violent and vengeful, and the ironic treatment of one of the characters as the 'innocent' caught in the crossfire of the primal desires and actions becomes whatever passes for a moral core in a Mishima novel. Its ambiguity is where the intrigue comes in though, so even though I was left quite cold and a bit eluded by sympathies for the characters, I feel that's exactly the point, and the fact that I was searching for that sympathy at all is very much to the author's credit for creating that interest.

25) Northanger Abbey - Jane Austen

I don’t think I’ve stuck to my one Austen a year I’d planned a few years ago, but here this one is and it leaves me with just Mansfield Park to have read her entire oeuvre. I went into this knowing it’s Austen’s attempt at a Gothic novel, and it does make me curious as to the historiography of why. Did she lose a bet to write a Gothic novel, despite having no aptitude to do as such? Because… look. For the most part this is a perfectly serviceable Austen novel. Its main weakness for its lengthy part one is a lack of what’s really at stake, since it tells a similar story to the rest of her output: of manners and decorum, of love and longing and even yes, pride and prejudice. Or sense and sensibility. But at the end of part one where we spent the entire time in Bath and there had been no mention of an abbey or a locale called Northanger, I could think of at least two things wrong with the title. So part two takes us to the titular place, and here is where Austen makes her overtures, such as they are, to the Gothic genre. In a word: they’re terrible. They’re not just terrible but completely out of place, literally like she had to include some Gothic element to win a box of crackerjacks and had forgotten that stipulation after writing most of the story already. They’re superfluous, they’re facile and go nowhere, and more to the point they come from nothing, since part one has nothing to do with the overwhelming Gothic power of the titular Abbey, and has no foreshadowing which is such a critical part of the gothic genre. But let’s return to the actual story and not Austen’s awkward asides as the result of losing a bet. The key story arc has a lot of merit: I was caught up in Catherine’s desire for Mr Tilney, I was more caught up with the horribly awkward advances of the vexatious and obnoxious John Thorpe, so really the most egregious sin Austen commits is in wrapping up the main love story so glibly and hastily. It feels like she had a deadline to meet and couldn’t really fulfill the potential of her own story because she just had to get to its denouement as quickly as possible. We knew where the story was going if only because she would refer to Catherine as “our heroine” and Mr Tilney as “our hero”, so why not give them the glorious reunion we had hoped for? We could have had a really romantic reunion to make the emotional arc of the story worthwhile, but instead we got a quickfire “by the way they end up together and shit. Whatever. Stop bothering me I’ve got crackerjacks to eat” and that is the more ugly weakness of this otherwise fine book, even in competition with the pathetic attempts at Gothic spooks.

24) Act of God - Jill Ciment

Picked this up purely because it was short, but also my library put it in the ‘humour’ section so I thought it might be light-hearted and funny. It isn’t overly funny, although the other two criteria worked well as I finished it fairly quickly. And it is funny, but more of a dark humour and not exactly light-hearted. It revolves around a community of people living in Brooklyn who are forced to evacuate from their homes when a luminescent toxic supermold is found growing in their residences. It centres around ageing twins Edith and Kat, whose disparate personalities and lifestyle leads them down different paths and different ways of dealing with their displacement. The tone of the story is at turns surreal and fantastical, even nightmarish when this supermold gets out of control and seems to touch everything. There’s also a wry look at New York living, the haves and various tiers and types of havenots, and how to deal with spiralling adversity. I think Ciment’s tendency towards comedy actually feels a little glib at times, and the way she resolves the story feels both soap operatic in the way that everybody deals with the misfortune by bonding together, but also there’s an irritating lack of resolution in fact, not just by the ambiguous ending but the fact that there are quite a few loose ends left over: particularly the mystery of who (the fuck) is Alice, this older dementia patient who Kat visits at one point, who has no idea who she is and why she’s there. It’s not explained to the reader either. There feels like potential for some commentary on close-knit living, environmentalism and climate change although Ciment’s focus on tongue in cheek humour and the spiralling chaos of the story seems to take precedence, and the ambiguity of the ending leaves a few too many questions unanswered for it to be properly satisfying.

23) The Green Road - Anne Enright

This is the third Enright book I’ve read, the two previous including her booker prize-winning The Gathering and a random book called The Hat My Father Wore which I picked up in a used-book sale, and although I remember reading them both I remember absolutely nothing about them. And from reading this book, I can get a pretty clear idea as to why: will I remember much about this book? Well I keep these written up notes now so that will help, but if not for these I’d be doubtful. I feel there’s a strong commitment from Enright towards ambiguity which, coupled with her fragmented modernist approach to prose, makes it hard for her books to leave me with lasting emotional impact. In this book she tells the story of the Madigan children and their mother Rosaleen, all introduced to us in a series of four short stories from each of the four kids’ perspectives but across a span of several decades. While each of these stories is engaging, they’re all individually engaging and what they contribute to the overarching family saga is just a fragment. When the family and the stories converge in the second part when the children all return home to Ireland for one final Christmas, and the stories all reach their collective emotional culmination, the ambiguity throughout the narrative has left me in two minds about how I’m meant to feel. The thing is, that’s by design: Rosaleen the matriarch is meant to be a perplexing character, needy and emotionally aloof, sharp-tongued yet absent and dreamy. Enright’s choice to tell her family’s story in little vignettes means there are too many emotional threads for any of them to have any great depth, and her frequent use of stream of consciousness is done in such a cold and detached way that I found myself distanced from the psychology of the characters. Where it does resonate though is in the relationships between people, all of the siblings reacting their own ways to Rosaleen’s standoffishness, her criticisms, her unrealistic expectations and constantly shifting goalposts. But that resonates largely because we’ve seen family sagas like this before, not because these characters are so painstakingly drawn that you feel everything in sync with them. So ultimately I feel that Enright writes with fluidity - possibly too much - but without a deeply affecting manner, while her characters are largely mannequins to hang the adornments of their relationships on and don’t have memorable or clearly discernible personalities of their own. Whether these criticisms could be applied to The Gathering or The Hat My Father Wore too is not my fallible memory’s to say, but in this case there just isn’t any great sense of wonder or catharsis from the story.

22) The Invisible Life of Euridice Gusmao - Martha Batalha

I often pick up books like this in my local library, that have a nice cover design that's eye-catching enough, and when they're written by a woman and particularly if it's a translated book I tend to be more well-disposed to giving it a go, because it's far enough removed from my milieu that I'll likely experience something new. This book I guess delivers that, but I also found myself fairly unsure about really what to make of it. It tells the story of Euridice Gusmao, a good and obedient wife living in the suburbs of Rio de Janeiro, and the various projects that she undertakes in her marriage that give her life purpose. When I reduce it to those terms the book actually sounds quite enjoyable - and it is somewhat, don't get me wrong - but I feel it loses that focus as the book goes on, and other characters start to take their turn as the main character for a while, so in the end, the 'invisible life' of the title actually becomes too invisible even to its own author. What I did appreciate about this book was that it had a kind of 'soft' feminism to it: it does position women as the hero of its various narrative threads, and a lot of the empowerment it gives them is at the expense of the men in their lives. But it doesn't really laugh at those men, nor does it portray them as irredeemable villains: at worst they're cowardly and a bit hapless, but I think without being too explicit about it, Batalha portrays the men as just as much victims of the patriarchy as the womenfolk. In many ways they act in the ways they do because it's how men are expected to act, but in this particular story the men can't really lash out at their frustrations properly, so they end up turning all their anger on themselves and sabotaging their own happiness where they could instead flourish by letting their wives enjoy their own lives in their own ways. Central to all this is Antenor, Euridice's husband, who tends to become an NPC in his own life and, while he fails at every attempt to assert himself, ends up being a success largely because he's such a non-event that he has no hubris to be his undoing. I feel like I'm talking myself into liking this book more than I did, but I think that's the point: there's a lot of good, juicy themes in this book that I feel could have been explored in greater depth, but it lost its focus for a lot of the narrative and ended up being a whole lot of interesting ideas in search of an author to tie them all together.

21) The Neighborhood - Mario Vargas Llosa

Randomly picked this one up as one of several Mario Vargas Llosa options in the library, not really knowing what to expect. It’s a fairly odd book, bringing together a series of connected narratives centred around the wealthy mining entrepreneur Enrique. It got off on the wrong foot a bit starting with a “lesbian awakening” scene between Enrique’s wife and the wife of Enrique’s best friend-slash-lawyer, the kind of machinations of which I’ve seen more times in short porn scenes than in Nobel-winning literature as it had a particularly ‘horny male’ gaze to it. But from there it expands into more of a hard-boiled story about blackmail, government corruption and the media’s role in facilitating, enabling and ultimately exposing both. It’s a somewhat conventionally plotted and written story for the most point, with some mystery and suspense interspersed with lots more of those really horny sex scenes, hetero and otherwise. What makes it a bit more worthy of note is how Llosa draws the climax and conclusion in more self-conscious ways that blur the fourth wall a bit. The chapter entitled “A Whirlpool” is great as it draws together five different scenes, one of them from a different timeline, all told ‘simultaneously’ in that there are no paragraph breaks but switching between them every three or four lines, so it’s like a cinematic montage scene in novel form. The following chapter then consists of sections of a magazine report that ensues following these scenes and that constitutes the climax. So Llosa’s slightly awkward horniness aside (we get it, the women are hot, move on dude), there are some innovative approaches he takes that set this apart from the typical crime fiction it otherwise is, aside from its scope (reaching up to the highest echelons of government) and the other noteworthy fact of its being set in Peru where I otherwise don’t read voices from very often.