le Carré, John: A Murder of Quality: A George Smiley Novel (George Smiley, 2)
This is the second in John LeCarré's series of novels featuring George Smiley. He is a spy in most of the books, but not in this one. Instead of engaging in espionage, Smiley, because of his intelligence background, is called upon to investigate a murder at a posh English boarding school. This set-up results in a novel that succeeds in every way: the plot is tight, the characters believable and interesting, the social critique biting, and the prose style is good enough that aspiring writers should pay close attention to it.
I'll move on to the third novel in the series, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, soon. This is the novel that made LeCarré's name, though it's hard to imagine that it will be better than A Murder of Quality.
Plomer, William: Turbott Wolfe: A Novel (20th Century Rediscoveries)
Turbott Wolfe is a very short novel into which author William Plomer manages to incorporate a lot. Set in colonial South Africa, there are corruscating caricatures of fellow whites with names like Flescher and Bloodworth (with one exception every one of the white settlers' appearances are grotesque). There are the "natives," who, in opposition to his ghastly colonial neighbors, Wolfe at first views sympathetically and then idealizes. Most of all, there is the portrait of Turbott Wolfe, who, dying, tells his story to one William Plomer. The author manages to make the man complex enough that, at novel's end, we are not sure whether to dismiss him as a dilettante and a failure, or respect him as a man with laudable principles. Maybe both. Maybe neither.
After publishing Turbott Wolfe, Plomer left South Africa. I had forgotten that his next port of call was Japan where he spent a few years teaching literature. The country was to give him material for his novel Sado and other Japanese stories.
von Kleist, Heinrich: Selected Prose of Heinrich von Kleist
Translator Peter Wortsman notes that Heinrich von Kleist's stories "were condemned by scandalized critics as 'hack jobs,' 'sheer nonsense,' 'senseless frivolities,' 'the work of a deranged mind,' 'un-German, stiff, twisted and coarse.'" Perhaps it is his refusal or inability to craft fiction that would have pleased these hidebound critics that accounts for the regard in which he is held today. It is no surprise that more perceptive readers have had no trouble seeing Kleist's worth. Franz Kafka, for example, reports that he read Kleist's novella "Michael Kohlhaas" with reverence. Thomas Mann remarks that "Kleist's narrative language is completely unique . . . even in his day nobody wrote as he did." Neither do many people write like him today. Wortsman's translations seem to me (I read no German) to effectively convey the power of that prose, but I can't help but have a nagging suspicion that, unable to experience the the author's "tangled, knotted, overloaded sentences . . . painstakingly soddered together . . . and driven by a breathless tempo," (Mann) in German I am not experiencing the full splendor of this work. One is grateful to translators. And yet . . . .
Cather, Willa: Death Comes for the Archbishop (Vintage Classics)
Willa Cather says that, in Death Comes for the Archbishop, she wanted to create “ . . . something without accent…,” and, “something in the style of legend, which is absolutely the reverse of dramatic treatment.”
This is exactly what she does, and it gives us a novel that succeeds in a way entirely different from most plot-driven (i.e. most) fiction. The novel is episodic, and the prose has that Catherian flatness which is somehow never dull, but has the splendor of a granite slab rather than that of a rushing river. Landscapes always play a major, if not the major, role in her works. Landscapes do change and move, but at a rate that is geologic rather than human. This change as it happens is unintelligible to the human eye. Cather's fiction seems to progress in the same way. As with the films of Ozu, the plot is secondary, and what has moved us is mysterious, but we are moved, and something did happen.
Margery Allingham: Look to the Lady: An Albert Campion Mystery
Whoops. Should have entered this one before The Cambodian Book of the Dead. It's another good one from Margery Allingham. I still have a hard time with Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers, but these are okay. As Doyle did with Sherlock Holmes, she has created a main character in Albert Campion who delights us whenever he ambles onto the page. This novel would seem to confirm that Allingham shares with other writers of the period a fascination with the atavistic beliefs and superstitions that are barely hidden in rural England, and that can surface in bloody and macabre ways. In any case, this buried knowledge does make for some good plots, as M.R. James and others have shown us.
Vater, Tom: The Cambodian Book Of The Dead (Detective Maier Mysteries)
South-East Asia, as anyone who has been there knows, is an alluring place. It is no less attractive in fiction, and indeed the setting is one of the strongest facets of Tom Vater's Cambodian Book of the Dead. It is a detective yarn that follows a German detective on a job in Cambodia. To the extent that it is about the people and the place, it is good fun. When metaphysics enters into it, it tends to bog down, but Vater would probably argue that metaphysics has to enter into it. As he notes at one point, "Every Cambodian has seen a ghost." The book, too, suffers from the Fu Manchu problem: Asian bad guys can't just be bad; they must be bad in ways that are exotic and stretch belief. Although there are non-Asian bad guys in this novel, only the Cambodian has, for example, an army of pubescent girls in black Khmer Rouge pajamas who are trained to kill. Will I continue with the series? Maybe.
Teffi: Memories: From Moscow to the Black Sea (New York Review Books Classics)
For no particular reason, I seem to be reading memoirs by Russian women who lived through the Russian revolution. I'm glad to have pulled Teffi's Memories: From Moscow to the Black Sea off the shelf. In a translation by Edythe Haber she has a lovely voice, at once capable of humor, but also of evoking the horrors and hardships she lived through without hysterics. The horror, hardship, and humor are all present in this paragraph about life on a barely seaworthy ship that carries her through part of her journey. Also Teffi's lovely tone:
"The first days of heroics, when Colonel S. had stood on the deck, rolled up up his sleeves, and kneaded dough for flatbreads, a gold bracelet jingling on his handsome white wrist, while a famous statistician sat beside him and calculated in a loud voice the total weight of the bread to be baked, in proportion to the number of working souls on board, and then half-souls and quarter-souls—those first days of heroic amateurism were gone."
The Russians never disappoint.
Willa Cather: My Ántonia
This is the third of Cather's Pioneer trilogy, and it's as good as the first and second entries, which means it's very good indeed. In the first, O Pioneers!, we get a portrait of the unforgiving Nebraska plains and a woman who thrives there. In the second, we get a woman whose art allows her to escape her harsh, provincial homeland (this time the Colorado desert), and in My Ántonia we are given, through the eyes of her best friend—lover really, though it's never consummated—a woman who thrives, in spite of much, in her rural home. One reads Cather and is tremendously moved. It's never clear how her clean, simple prose does this to us, and that mystery is a marker of her greatness.
Doctorow, Cory: Red Team Blues: A Martin Hench Novel (The Martin Hench Novels)
Although I've enjoyed the bits and pieces of Cory Doctorow's work that have come my way, I think this is the first novel I've read by him. I'm glad I did. The protagonist is . . . wait for it . . . an accountant, but that doesn't stop him from getting on the wrong side of the Zetas and some Azerbaijani bad actors. Some of the technical detail involving Bitcoin and blockchains went over my head, but the accountant's wry take on life in and around San Francisco and Silicon Valley keep one turning pages, along with, of course, the well-constructed plot. Doctorow, in this case through his characters, has a lot to tell us about the modern world: the sources of its injustices and also how things might be made better.
- Rowe, Simon: Mami Suzuki: Private Eye
It is impossible to write a book in as well-established a genre as detective fiction without nodding to the established classics of that genre. The haru-ichiban, for example, that blows through Kobe in the first of the stories Simon Rowe gives us about the private eye Mami Suzuki, will certainly call to mind the Santa Anas that blow through Raymond Chandler's Los Angeles. Of course, all the writers carrying on the genre after its progenitors not only preserve the conventions but do their best to tweak them. The most successful entries are those which preserve enough of the things that make the genre appealing but also include tweaks enough to make it new. Rowe's detective is something out of the ordinary. She is a single mother taking care of both her daughter and her own mother. She has a day job at the front desk of an international hotel, so she's only able to moonlight as a private eye, and she drinks a bit more than is good for her (and unlike a lot of hard-boiled detectives, the alcohol she consumes actually affects her). Like the best fictional detectives, though, she does not remain the same. Like an actual human being, she changes as we move through the pages so that not all of her quirks remain in place at book's end. She is an appealing enough character that one looks forward to more in what will surely be a series.
Strangely enough, the entire time I was living in Japan, I always knew I would leave someday. As the years went by, many friends teased me that I'd never leave, but I insisted I would go to grad school in the US someday. Yet during every moment of those 15 years as a resident of Japan, it always felt like home to me, and I assimilated the best I could (and was allowed to.) A strange dichotomy.
Ironically, a mere year after returning to the US, I'm certain that Japan will once again become my home, this time a permanent one. Life as it is lived in the States has little appeal. Where my wife and I had assumed we'd split our life between the two countries, we are now absolutely certain that we're better suited to life in Japan.
So see you in a couple years David...
Posted by: ted | 03/23/2011 at 01:04 PM
Even now, even in the post-quake radiation-jittery times we are in, Japan still seems to me a good place to be, so I look forward to seeing you, Ted, back in the archipelago for a long delayed beer or two.
Posted by: David | 03/23/2011 at 01:21 PM
Having offered a room to my bother Julian if he should decide to leave, I appreciate how well you have put into words the dilemma so many people are experiencing at the moment.
Not only my thoughts but those of so many others are turned towards all of you in Japan at this time.
Chas
Posted by: chas | 03/23/2011 at 09:45 PM
Why stop at two beers, David?
(Actually I'm a lightweight, so look forward to multiple beer-fuelled chats...)
Posted by: ted | 03/23/2011 at 11:07 PM
And then there is this:
http://www.politicomix.net/2011/03/somewhere-in-tokyo-morning-commute.html
Posted by: ted | 03/23/2011 at 11:28 PM
Someone pointed out that the term used for those who decide to go, "fly-jin," is offensive. They should be called "fly-koku-jin."
Posted by: David | 03/24/2011 at 06:51 AM