Nguyen, Viet Thanh: The Sympathizer: A Novel (Pulitzer Prize for Fiction)
This book came out in 2015. It’s sequel came out last year. I read a review that made me want to read that sequel, but figured I’d better read the first volume first. The result of doing so is that I probably won’t go on to read the sequel. The Sympathizer is okay, perceptive about life as a divided person and life in the Vietnamese refugee community, but somehow, at this late date, the perceptions don’t seem terribly fresh. I become increasingly convinced that contemporary literary fiction is just not for me.
le Carré, John: Call for the Dead: A George Smiley Novel
A favorite author, Paco Ignacio Taibo II, wrote an excellent article about John le Carré in which he convinced me that I really should delve into the work of that legendary writer more deeply than I had. I'm glad he did. His protagonist, the ironically named Smiley, is a marvelous protagonist: intelligent, morose, erudite, and depressed: He is human. Through Smiley we revisit the Cold War: Russia and East Germany are enemies, but communism is not without its attractions. The game is afoot, and Smiley, in his plodding way, is in the thick of it. I'm glad there are several more books in the series.
Cherryh, C. J.: Invader: Book Two of Foreigner
Boy, that's a cheesy cover, but it's a good book. Cherryh has gotten most of the "As you know, Bob" asides out of the way in the first volume, so the story moves along, but as she tells her tale from the point of view of the main character, and strictly limits herself to what that character knows, we often share his confusion, and Atevi diplomacy is nothing if not confusing, not least because they are not biologically human. This installment ends with two other human beings joining the protagonist on the planet of the Atevi. I've already bought the third volume to find out what happens next.
Cherryh, C. J.: Foreigner: 10th Anniversary Edition (Foreigner series Book 1)
It’s easy to think of the “science” in science fiction as being something akin to engineering: space ships, ray guns, jetpacks. But that association is naive. The science in science fiction has long included social sciences such as anthropology, sociology, psychology, and even archaeology. C.J. Cherryh’s Foreigner draws on all of those and more in her picture of a planet inhabited by aliens called Atevi. A group of human beings stumbled onto their planet, and their first contact eventually gave rise to a war, the upshot of which was that the humans were exiled to an island off the coast of the mainland on which the Atevi live. The diplomacy necessary for these two species to coexist in the wake of the war, is handled by a foreigner, a human being who resides on the Atevi’s planet and works to interpret each culture to the other. Anyone who has lived in a culture different from his or her own will recognize the difficulties this foreigner encounters, even if the foreign culture in which one lives is populated by members of the same species.
Eliot, George: Middlemarch
One reason that Victorian novels are great in the way that they are great is that they seem to be written without self-consciousness as to the form. The novels are not about novels, but, at their best, are rich, thick, detailed looks at the societies they consider. This is perhaps more true of George Eliot in Middlemarch than it is even of her great contemporaries, the whole theme of the novel being the ways in which one's society acts on one, and how little scope one has for kicking over society's traces. Dorothea, whose individuality we can only admire, is no more successful in her efforts to live the righteous life she dreams of than are other less admirable (but oh so human in their faults) characters. The society in which she lives does not allow for an Antigone or a St.Theresa. 2022 is shaping up for me to be a year of returning to the Victorian novels I've always loved, and perhaps especially to those eminent Victorians I know less well than Trollope and Dickens.
Fagan, John Gerard: Fish Town
Fish Town is a collection of "poems" by John Gerard Fagan about his life in Japan from 2013 to 2019. I put "poems" in quotation marks because Fagan's verse is firmly in the chopped prose camp. We get lines like, for example, "they put TVs in the staff room for important news events / Scotland's vote on independence was one of them / I voted via proxy with my brother," and can detect none of the special attention to language that characterizes the best poetry. Other snippets are recognizable as poems because lines are broken in odd places, but there seems no rhyme (just kidding) or reason for why the lines are chopped up in the way they are. It's hard to take Fagan's snippets seriously as poems, but that doesn't mean the snippets, especially taken together, are unworthy of attention. He does succeed in giving a lucid picture of what life is like for a young man, newly washed up in Japan, lonely and drifting into a life. Those of us who have been there will recognize the picture he paints: being dispatched to secondary schools in rural Shizuoka and exurban Chiba, lonely in crap apartments in nothing towns, the drinking, the oddness. Maybe the reason for dividing up what might as well be called prose into "poems" is that readers like me, who would never pick up a prose memoir of the life of an English teacher in Japan (been there, done that) may be intrigued enough to give a poetic cycle about an English teacher in Japan a chance. I don't regret that I did. It's a quick and enjoyable read. Fagan mentions a couple of times in Fish Town a novel he is working on, but never that he is writing poetry. One wonders if the "novel" became the "poems."
Sayers, Dorothy L.: Whose Body?
Because lots of people are as passionate about Dorothy Sayers as I am about Raymond Chandler, from time to time I give her another try. My usual response is “meh,” mostly, I think, because parts of her Lord Peter Wimsey novels veer into a mode I’ve never appreciated: the English jocular. Having said that, this novel, free on Gutenberg, was the most enjoyable attempt to date, so much so that I may read another somewhere down the line and hope that, as it seems to with this one, the author’s intelligence compensates for the English jocular.
Rickman, Phil: Friends of the Dusk (14) (Merrily Watkins Mysteries)
Phil Rickman continues to pull off his unlikely blend of police procedural with a soupçon of the supernatural. Vampires figure in this one.
McCabe, Cameron: The Face on the Cutting-Room Floor
Apparently the author of this novel, Ernst Julius Bornemann writing under the pseudonym Cameron McCabe, considered this novel, which he wrote in English before he really knew English, “no more than a finger exercise on the keyboard of a new language.” Bornemann, who went on to be a sexologist of some note among many other things, placed so little importance on the novel that for years the true identity of Cameron McCabe remained unknown. The author’s English is just idiosyncratic enough to be jarring at first, but one gets used to it and certain passages come to seem delightful. Many of these delights come as an epilogue to the book, an analysis of the reception of the book along with critical commentary the book excited. This epilogue is written by a character who appears in the novel, an account of a murder possibly committed by one Cameron McCabe. It’s an odd book, recommended for those seeking something other than the same old thing.
Thackeray, William Makepeace: Vanity Fair
The English novel reached its high point during the reign of Queen Victoria. William Thackeray’s Vanity Fair provides further evidence for that. It’s a story well-told that is bursting at the seams—as all the great Victorian novels are—with humanity. It’s no surprise, I guess, that at least to modern sensibilities, the wicked Becky Sharp is a more attractive character than the milksop Amelia.
I actually don't think books ever went away. Of course there were more book / magazine / newspaper readers back when there was basically no alternative, but even with alternatives text-based media still does well. Probably some of the people you see staring at screens are reading books. That is they are readers for whom, I would guess, like most of us, the text is the thing. The vehicle--print or pixels--is unimportant.
Posted by: Only a Blockhead | 10/26/2013 at 09:22 AM