Avram Davidson: Masters of the Maze
Much of the best of Avram Davidson's work has been republished. That leaves the less than five-star Davidsons, and 1965 Masters of the Maze, I am afraid, falls into that category. That's not to say the Davidsonian wit and eccentric erudition is not there and not a delight; it's just that the novel as a whole is less than gripping. For completists only, I would say.
Henry James: The Turn of the Screw and The Aspern Papers (with a Preface by Henry James)
The Turn of the Screw is among the best short novels I have read. It a ghost story in which we are uncertain that the ghosts exist, an examination of class anxiety, and it contains one of the most subtly constructed unreliable narrators in English literature. As ghost stories should be, it is terrifying, but mostly because it unmoors us: we are never quite sure how we are to take this uncanny, unsettling tale.
Attica Locke: Bluebird, Bluebird
Attica Locke seems to understand that who done it is always the least interesting part of any who-done-it. Thus she builds a world—rural East Texas—and gives us a look into African American life in that part of the world, that is complex and compelling. Her protagonist, a Texas Ranger whose marriage is on the skids, who is drinking too much, and who cares too much—or so his colleagues seem to believe—about the injustices African Americans suffer in much of the United States, is someone we're glad to meet and follow as he comes to understand that the two murders that happen in Lark, Texas are not simple, and that, as another Southern writer said, "The past isn't dead. It isn't even past."
Maria Thomas: African Visas
I read Maria Thomas's first two books years ago, and remember enjoying them. I thought that was all she had written, but then I stumbled across this in a used book store. It is a collection published a couple of years after she died in a plane crash in Africa, her subject, the place she had spent much of her life.
As is often the case with posthumous publications, it's a mixed bag. The novella, The Jiru Road, which anchors the collection is not as accomplished as her other work; one guesses it was an early attempt at a novel, though her talent does shine through in places. The short stories are a mixed bag: some barely concealed memoir, others that seem to end without resolution, but not in a way that resonates.
Maybe I'll go back and have another look at the two books published before this one: Come to Africa and Save Your Marriage and Antonia saw the Oryx First.
Marghanita Laski: Little Boy Lost (Persephone Classics)
I am grateful to the feminist presses such as Persephone that have that have long been at the forefront in bringing us superb novels that have been forgotten. A recent discovery they, and then, thanks to them, I, have made is Marghanita Laski's 1949 novel, Little Boy Lost. It survives as much more than a period piece: it is a book that grips one both intellectually and emotionally.
Set mostly in post-war France we follow the protagonist, a prissy, self-centered English intellectual with whom it is quite easy to identify in spite of (because of?) his less than attractive personality as he moves through a France still far from recovery in search of his child, a boy who, in the chaos of war, was lost. The problem is, he's not sure if he wants the boy, and when it's impossible to prove that a boy who may be his son and who is living, malnourished and deprived with the rest of the inmates in an orphanage, he is tempted to use that as an excuse not to take responsibility for him, to return to his ordered and comfortable life.
Read the book and find out what he decides.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
Every so often one needs to reread these stories, and it is the stories, rather than Doyle's novels, to which one wants to return. I was recently discussing the awful Dan Brown with a friend, and we wondered why anyone read his work when there was pulp so much more satisfying—these stories, for example—available. This phenomenon remains mysterious.
Ira Nadel: Cathay: Ezra Pound's Orient (Penguin Specials)
This little book was a pleasure to have in my pocket--it's that small--for the last few days. It includes a few chapters of background about Pound and the creation of his collection, Cathay, but the pay-off is, of course, the facsimile edition of Cathay that appears in the book's final pages. One can argue with the accuracy of Pound's translations, and many have, unsurprisingly, since he didn't know Chinese, but one can't argue with the beauty of the poems he has given us. How can one tire of "Song of the Bowmen of Shu," Or "The River Merchant's Wife: A Letter," or really any of the poems in Cathay?
Dale Pendell: Walking With Nobby: Conversations with Norman O. Brown
Norman O. Brown was a name to be reckoned with back in the seventies, but, though I was a student at UCSC, where he taught, I never took a class with him, and though he was considered important, I have never read anything he wrote. I have now, however, thanks to poet Dale Pendell, accompanied him on a few walks. Pendell, who did study with him at UCSC got in the habit of walking and talking with him, and managed to remember their talks and records them here. They are rich enough in ideas and broad enough in range of reference that the recto pages of the book are filled with useful and interesting explanatory notes while the verso pages contain the conversation. The book was an enjoyable and stimulating read, but it made me miss Santa Cruz more than it made me want to read Brown.
Hideo Yokoyama: Six Four: A Novel
One opens this book expecting it to be a police procedural, and in a way it is. Perhaps, in that it's actually a novel about working in the bureaucracy that the police department is, and, by extension, any bureaucracy, it is the first honest police procedural. It includes all the frustrations and ass-coverings, and slow-downs, and stonewalling, and paper-shuffling, that any of us privileged to work in a company or a hospital or a university or . . . a whole lot of places, will know all too well. As such, it can be, like spending one's days as a cog in a bureaucratic machine, a bit of a grind; the long novel drags in places, and there are no gun-battles or car chases or colorful characters to spice things up. What saves it, though, is that, though it is a clear eyed account of bureaucracy, it is not a simplistic attack on bureaucracy. The protagonist, a detective who's been moved to Public Relations, comes to appreciate that bureaucrats do serve a necessary function, that a society of lone wolves of the type that are lionized in most pop culture, would not be one in which most of us would want to live.
The book revolves around kidnappings of two girls and one girl, the detective/bureaucrat's daughter, who has gone missing. One of the girls we know from the outset was murdered. Author Hideo Yokoyama drops enough clues about the daughter that it's hard not to be pretty sure about where she is at the end, but it is not confirmed. As for the other girl, well, that would be a spoiler, so I'll stop here.
William Shakespeare: The Sonnets and A Lover's Complaint (New Penguin Shakespeare)
Of course I've been reading in the sonnets for years: this poem, that sequence, but this is actually the first time I've sat down and read them, 1-154. I waited too long. It's something everyone should do, and something I will certainly do again. Of course there are individual poems that stand out, but taking them as a whole, the continued poking and prodding at ideas, metaphors employed differently from one sonnet to the next, enriches the experience.
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