- LibraryThing
- All topics
- Hot topics
- Book discussions
- All discussions
- Your LibraryThing
- Join to start using.
 |
Steven03tx's 12 in 12 in the RoughJoin LibraryThing to post. 1StevenTXEdited: Oct 14, 2012, 9:44am 
I'm completely redefining my 12 in 12 Challenge at the last minute because the number of group reads and themed reads I had subsequently joined made my original very ambitious plan impossible to complete. Looking for a way to still provide a challenge that helps diversify my reading, I came across The Rough Guide to Classic Novels. It lists novels according to twelve classifications: 1. Love, romance and sex - complete 2. Families 3. Rites of passage 4. Heroes and anti-heroes 5. Making it 6. Adventure 7. War, violence and conflict 8. A sense of place - complete 9. Incredible worlds 10. Horror and mystery - complete 11. Crime and punishment - complete 12. Comedy and satire There are 229 novels featured in this reference, of which I've already read 158. I didn't make a special effort to do so--most of the works are standard classics. The categories aren't the same size. The largest is "Love, Romance and Sex" with 29 books; the smallest is "Horror and Mystery" with 10. Following each featured work there is a "Where to go next" entry. Some of these "go next" entries don't really fit the category--they just happen to be other recommendations by that author--while others are similar books by other writers. My goal for 2012 is to read 9 books that fit each category, for a total of 108 novels. They don't have to be the ones recommended by the Rough Guide, but I will try to include as many as possible. 
Fantastic idea for the challenge! I've got you starred and can't wait to see how your reading goes!
Looking forward to your reviews, especially of The Name of the Rose. It's one of my favorites. Have you read any other of Eco's books?
Fabulous imagery and VERY interesting books. De-starred, re-starred, and looking forward to more of your enlightening reviews. 19mamzelDec 24, 2011, 2:24pm
I think I will learn of some interesting titles here. I'm looking forward to comments on your finished ones.
Love the pictures and am looking forward to following your thread again this year! 21psuttoDec 26, 2011, 5:39am
Starring the new thread looking forwards to reading some more of your great reviews
Great way of creating the categories and I admire your selection of visuals to accompany each category. I wish I had that much imagination.
Great paintings, and looks like an interesting list of books. I've only read a few of them & the ones I have were good. Cousin Bette and Rebecca. I'll be checking back.
Wow, I feel like I just spent my lunch break at a museum. Thanks for the art! Will be back to check out your reviews. 25StevenTXEdited: Dec 29, 2011, 1:59pm
The pictures are all linked from this web site, by the way: http://www.wga.hu/. It is a wonderful free database of art from the middle ages through the mid-19th century. I'll probably change them from time to time.
Interesting selections! I look forward to reading your reviews.
Category 11: Crime and Punishment The Sea and Poison by Shusaku EndoFirst published in Japanese 1957 Translation by Michael Gallagher 1972   The Sea and Poison is the story of medical experiments carried out by vivisection upon American prisoners by Japanese doctors during World War II. It is just as much the story of the Holocaust or any other act of organized inhumanity, for it is about apathy, indifference, and guilt and what leads otherwise good people to become participants in evil acts. The novel begins in post-War Japan where the narrator, a newcomer to a community outside Tokyo, in need of medical care finds a doctor named Suguro who is remarkably skillful but strangely reclusive and reticent. On investigating Suguro's background he learns that the doctor was imprisoned for war crimes committed at the hospital where he interned in Fukuoka. The narrative then shifts from first to third person and back several times to tell the story, not just of Dr Suguro, but of other participants in the Fukuoka experiments as well. Each of them has come to the point, through various happenings in their personal lives, where each believes he or she is capable of complete indifference to human suffering. The Sea and Poison is compact, engrossing, and rich with symbolism. The sea, for example, is an ever-present element in the minds of the characters, even when not physically apparent, with the surging surf echoing in their heads like the heartbeat of a human conscience. Another persistent symbol is the dust, dirt, and blood which can never be completely washed away just as the doctors and nurses can never erase their guilt or the memories of what they have seen and done. By extension the novel addresses Japan's collective war guilt, but even more importantly speaks to man's history of atrocities against our own kind. 29psuttoJan 5, 2012, 1:11pm
Another great review, sounds a bit intense though!
Yes, it's intense, but not as much as you might think. There is some explicit description of surgical procedures, but the patients are anesthetized. Some readers have tagged this book "torture," but rest assured there is nothing of the sort.
Sea and Poison sounds great AND I think I can fit it into one of my categories! Love it when that happens!!
Great review of Sea and Poison and like _debbie_ said above, I can also fit it into one of my categories!
Love your pictures--lots of great books on your lists. I am going to try Sea and Poison--I am looking for more Japanese books.
For those wanting to explore Japanese literature, the Author Theme Reads group is devoting 2012 to Japanese authors.
Category 4: Heroes and anti-heroes The Savage Detectives by Roberto BolañoFirst published in Spanish 1998 Translation by Natasha Wimmer 2007   The Savage Detectives is an autobiographical novel told in documentary fashion. It begins in 1975 with the diary of Juan García Madero, a seventeen-year-old law student who aspires, instead, to be a poet. He starts his diary by announcing that he has been invited to join the visceral realists, only to admit that he really doesn't know what visceral realism is. What he does know, however, is that it is a movement being revived in Mexico City by two rather shadowy poet figures, Ulises Lima, a Mexican, and Alberto Belano, a Chilean (and obviously Bolaño himself). However, the activities Madero relates in his delightfully naïve diary turn out to be far more social and sexual than poetical, as he is increasingly caught up in the poets' circle of colleagues living on the intellectual, political, and legal fringe of Mexican society. The narrative completely changes form about a fifth of the way through the novel into a series of short (1-10 pages) dated statements by various individuals, some of which are characters integral to the story, others making only a brief and single appearance. The form resembles that of a television documentary where individuals pause for a moment in their daily routine and address the camera in response to an unseen interviewer. The statements, roughly but not entirely chronological, follow the lives of Lima and Belano from 1976 when they leave Mexico City to the mid-1990s, eventually separating and traveling through Europe and Africa. In some cases, however, the speaker has his or her own story to tell, and the visceral realists are mentioned only briefly, if at all. With dozens of voices speaking, often contradictory and obviously unreliable, the picture that gradually emerges of Lima and Belano is, at most, a composite. The two men never speak for themselves, and, ironically, this book about poets is entirely without an example of their poetry. Their voice is only heard in the impression they make on others. The author makes frequent use of visual and spatial allegory, so perhaps it is best to imagine The Savage Detectives as a large painting, one that is wrought in intricate and varied detail, but with two roughly man-shaped voids in the center. The outline of these shapes is deliberately vague, yet every detail of the painting is in some way a description of the missing forms. As the title of the novel implies, Belano and Lima are on a quest, yet one in which their passion and recklessness threatens to destroy not only that which they seek, but the two men themselves. They are both hero and anti-hero, at times saviors, at times fugitives, sometimes slavishly in love, more often fiercely independent and unpredictable. Aside from being the portrait of two poets, The Savage Detectives also vividly depicts the broader Ibero-American literary scene from an insider's point of view. It is a great novel, comparable in many ways to Kerouac's On the Road, Miller's Tropic of Cancer, and especially Cortázar's Hopscotch (La Rayuela). A final note: Do not fail to read Natasha Wimmer's introduction to her English translation. It is exactly what an introduction should be. It provides essential background information on the author and the influences which went into his work, yet neither spoils the plot nor prejudices your assessment of the novel itself.
Another great review Steven! I can see that it is going to be dangerous to visit your thread - too many book bullets! ;-)
Category 9: Incredible worlds Oryx and Crake by Margaret AtwoodFirst published 2003   Oryx and Crake is a science fiction novel that is both dystopian and post-apocalyptic. It is a cautionary tale about the dangers of genetic engineering but, more importantly, a statement about humanity putting its physical desires ahead of its intellectual and spiritual needs. The novel begins with a character called Snowman living in a devastated landscape and believing he may be the last survivor of the human species. Nearby is a community of creatures he calls "Crakers," human in appearance but different in ways that make it obvious they are the result of some genetic accident or manipulation. Within a few pages the reader is taken back to Snowman's childhood when he was called Jimmy. This is a time recognizable as a near-future extrapolation of the trends we see evident today: greater division between the rich and the poor, environmental damage due to global warming, corporations growing more powerful than governments, and science turning to genetic engineering in ever bolder projects to solve the problems of overpopulation and food shortage. The mysteries to be revealed, of course, are what specifically happened to turn Jimmy's world into Snowman's, what brought the Crakers into existence, and why Jimmy/Snowman was the only human survivor. In parallel with the advancements in genetic manipulation the author depicts an increasingly open market for the sexual exploitation of women and children, as well as the abuse of animals for entertainment purposes. When did the body first set out on its own adventures? Snowman thinks; after having ditched its old travelling companions, the mind and the soul, for whom it had once been considered a corrupt puppet acting out their dramas for them, or else bad company, leading the two astray. It must have got tired of the soul's constant nagging and whining and the anxiety-driven intellectual web-spinning of the mind, distracting it whenever it was getting its teeth into something juicy or its fingers into something good. It had dumped the other two back there somewhere, leaving them stranded in some damp sanctuary or stuffy lecture hall while it made a beeline for the topless bars, and it had dumped culture along with them.... the body had its own cultural forms. It had its own art. Executions were its tragedies, pornography was its romance. Oryx and Crake is a good novel, but not among Atwood's best. The impact of the frighteningly plausible "Jimmy" passages is diluted by the rather contrived set of events that leads to Snowman's world.
#39 - No, I plan to join the group read of 2666 here in March.
41StevenTXJan 14, 2012, 10:51am
Category 9: Incredible worlds 1Q84 by Haruki MurakamiFirst published in Japanese 2009 (parts 1 & 2), 2010 (part 3) English translation by Jay Rubin (parts 1 & 2) and Philip Gabriel (part 3) 2011   A young woman taking a taxi to an urgent appointment is caught in a horrendous traffic jam on an elevated Tokyo expressway. She abandons her taxi and takes an emergency stairway down from the freeway to the street level. Almost immediately, however, she begins to discover hints that, like Alice descending into Wonderland, she has somehow crossed over into a different reality. A young writer is called upon by his editor to rewrite a novella so it can qualify for a prestigious literary prize. The author, a beautiful and mysterious 17-year-old girl, has told a fantastic story, but in terrible prose. The writer, at first unwilling to accept such an unethical assignment, finds himself inexorably drawn toward the young girl and into the dangerous and magical world of her novella. The two converging stories of Aomame, the woman in traffic, and Tengo, the man who ghostwrites the novella, are told in alternate chapters. The setting is Tokyo in 1984, but in an alternate reality which Aomame names "1Q84." At the heart of the story is a fanatical cult and the bizarre secret it is protecting. 1Q84 is typical of Murakami's work in that it has moments of intense and emotional realism along with bizarre and cryptic elements of pure fantasy. There is no attempt to explain away these elements or fit them into any kind of system. While the characters move toward a personal resolution, there is no resolution for the world itself. The author's Wonderland remains unexplained and unexplainable; the characters simply learn to operate within it. This leads to the obvious question of whether this huge novel has anything to say beyond being hugely entertaining. There are certainly some illuminating passages on the nature of love and friendship, on the causes and effects of broken homes and family violence, on music and how it both reflects and influences our moods, and on God and religion. If there is, however, a larger all-encompassing theme to 1Q84 perhaps it is on the nature of fiction itself and the way an author becomes part of the world he creates. Perhaps Tengo has simply written the novel around himself and disappeared into it, making 1Q84 a huge work of metafiction. This is admittedly just conjecture about what is probably intended to be ultimately an inscrutable work of the imagination. 42StevenTXJan 14, 2012, 11:41pm
Category 3: Rites of passage Distant View of a Minaret and Other Stories by Alifa RifaatShort stories first published in Arabic Translated into English by Denys Johnson-Davies and published as a collection 1983  Distant View of a Minaret is a collection of 15 stories, all of them set in Egypt, mostly in Cairo. The protagonists are, in almost every case, women. They are women of all ages, economic circumstances, and states of mind. Most of the stories deal with times of passage: puberty, female circumcision, marriage, childbirth, separation, the death of a spouse or parent, and the death of the woman herself. All of the stories occur within the context of Islam, its daily rituals and its traditions governing sexual and family matters. Yet within this framework there is remarkable frankness. In the title story, "Distant View of a Minaret," a young married woman rues her husband's insensitivity to her sexual needs. In "An Incident in the Ghobashi Household," a mother finds a novel way to conceal her unmarried daughter's pregnancy. And in "My World of the Unknown," a story of scorching sensuality, a woman discovers sexual rapture with the help of an enchanted snake. Other stories focus on the poignant issues of aging, loneliness and death, offering a look at household and community life. In "At the Time of the Jasmine," one of the few stories focusing on a male character, a man's journey back home to bury his father brings him back in touch with the traditions and values of his youth. In "The Flat in Nakshabandi Street" an elderly woman's life has been reduced to the view of a single street from her third story window. Finally, "Just Another Day" brings the collection to a close by following the thoughts of a woman as she slips peacefully from this life to the next. Alifa Rifaat (1930-1996) was in most respects a typical Arab woman: she was a devout Muslim, did not attend college, spoke only Arabic, and seldom traveled outside her native Egypt. It is all the more surprising, therefore, that her work is that of an accomplished writer and that she so adeptly and candidly conveys to us the sense of her world and its values. She depicts women struggling for independence and fulfillment in a patriarchal society, but they are struggling within the structures and precepts of their religion, not against them. 43psuttoJan 15, 2012, 10:34am
The Rifaat sounds interesting but I'm drowning in short stories at he moment..
I've enjoyed a few Murakami books windup bird and Kafka on the shore but also read a few I've disliked Norwegian wood and after dark so am in two minds about the latest, your review makes it more likely I'll read it at some point 44StevenTXJan 15, 2012, 10:47pm
Category 1: Love, romance and sex The Songs of Bilitis by Pierre LouÿsFirst published 1894 as Les chansons de BilitisEnglish translation by Mitchell S. Buck 1926   "I sing of my flesh and my life, and not of the sterile shadows of buried lovers. Rest upon thy bed, O my body, according to thy voluptuous mission! Taste thy daily enjoyments and the passions without a tomorrow. Leave not a delight unknown to be regretted on the day of my death." Thus, more than 2500 years ago, wrote Bilitis: courtesan, poet, and protégé of Sappho. Her remarkable prose poems were presented to the French reading public in their first complete and unexpurgated translation in 1894 by Pierre Louÿs. Or so he would have us believe. Les chansons de Bilitis, complete with biographical sketch and an authoritative-looking bibliography, fooled even some experts when it was first published. But it was just a hoax, all of it the product of Louÿs's imagination. Yet what a beautiful hoax it is. The work consists of 143 short prose poems, divided into three books. In the first book Bilitis, the daughter of a Greek father and Phoenician mother, tells of her youth in Pamphylia, the southern coast of Asia Minor. "Stripped of my clothes, I climbed into a tree..." she begins. She revels both in her pastoral surroundings and in discovering the pleasures of her own body. Louÿs modeled his verses on the forms and themes of the Greek lyric poets, capturing their unique combination of youthful innocence and sensuousness. In the second book of verses, Bilitis has taken ship to the isle of Lesbos where she meets the famous Sappho and learns the pleasures of lesbian love. She takes a younger girl, Mnasidika, as a lover and devotes many of her verses to describing their love--a love that eventually turns to jealousy when Mnasidika abandons Bilitis. "And, above all, if my despair is a perpetual torture, it is because I know, moment by moment, how she swoons in the arms of another, what she demands of her and what she gives her." Bilitis journeys finally to Kypros where she becomes a courtesan serving the temple of Astarte. She celebrates her sybaritic life, laughs at the foibles of her friends and lovers, but wistfully recalls her lost love Mnasidika. Finally, approaching 40, Bilitis, with a hint of bitterness, calls out "Child, do not pass without loving me. I am still beautiful in the night; thou shalt see how much warmer my autumn is than the springtime of another.... Thou shalt be my last lover." This classic work of French Decadence is both refined and sensual, evoking uninhibited pagan passions in beautiful verse and sumptuous imagery.
Category 1: Love, romance and sex The End of the Affair by Graham GreeneFirst published 1952   In London during World War II a writer named Maurice Bendrix has carried on an affair with Sarah, the wife of his friend Henry Miles. More than a year after the affair was broken off, Henry, who was ignorant of it all, approaches Bendrix with a problem. He thinks his wife is seeing someone and wants Bendrix's advice about hiring a detective. Bendrix has never stopped loving Sarah, and now he is consumed with jealousy over the idea of her having taken another lover. Just as he did in Brighton Rock, Graham Greene tells an essentially secular story for the first half of the book, then transforms the novel into one about religious conviction. Bendrix, Henry and Sarah are all ostensibly atheists, but Sarah harbors a latent uncertainty that has been tormenting her mind and driving her unpredictable actions. She finds herself torn between love and faith. There are strong characters in this novel, and meaningful moral dilemmas. It also captures some of the moods of Londoners under the V-1 "buzz bomb" attacks in 1944 and describes the conditions in which they lived during and after the war. However it isn't a very pleasant novel to read. Bendrix, who narrates the story, is perpetually bitter, even when he is with the woman he loves. Nor is the resolution fully satisfactory. In his earlier novels such as The Heart of the Matter, Greene dealt wonderfully with situations where a character must choose between two courses of action on the basis of his belief system. In The End of the Affair, however, the choice is between belief and non-belief, a much more challenging situation which the author handles less convincingly. 46AnneDCJan 17, 2012, 9:36am
I love your theme-based categories and will be interested to see what you read throughout the year. Excellent reviews, too--you've already read several ( The Sea and Poison, The End of the Affair, 1Q84) that are on my list for the year.
Category 2: Families Four Major Plays by Henrik IbsenA Doll's House (1879), Ghosts (1881), Hedda Gabler (1890), and The Master Builder (1892) Hedda Gabler translated by Jens Arup, the rest by James McFarland   These are four exceptional plays, intense, compact and timeless. In "A Doll's House" a woman has everything a woman is expected to want: home, husband, children and friends, but she realizes it isn't what she wants. This play causes a furor when first performed, and some will still find it shocking. In "Ghosts," a woman's apparent act of charity conceals a scandalous family history. The title character of "Hedda Gabler," a proud and beautiful general's daughter, threw herself into a loveless marriage out of despair, but now finds herself at the apex of a love triangle. And in "The Master Builder," a play resembling a Greek tragedy, an aging contractor with an emotionally crippled wife finds in the young people who work for him both a temptation and a threat.
@ 45 -- I really liked The End of the Affair. Nice review, although I disagree with you about the ending, which I thought was kind of perfect! 49StevenTXJan 22, 2012, 12:23pm
Category 12: Comedy and Satire The Young Girl's Handbook of Good Manners by Pierre LouÿsWritten 1917, first published posthumously and anonymously 1927 Translation by Geoffrey Longnecker 2010   This short work is a parody of the books of etiquette and morals that were in vogue in the late 19th century. It offers advice in a number of categories such as "In the Home" and "At School." Here are some of the the milder examples: At Confession: If your confessor asks you how many times you have polluted yourself, do not reply: "And you?"
In Class: Do not draw teacher's private parts on the blackboard, especially if she showed them to you in confidence.
At the Hotel, Traveling: Do not ring for the maître d'hôtel at eleven o'clock at night to ask him for a banana. At that hour, ask for a candle.
Duties Toward Your Sister: When your dear sister leaves for the ball, do not write on the back of her white dress: "Please bugger me, gentlemen." Abstain from all inscriptions of this sort. This is no great work of literature, but as a satire of social conventions, puritanical morals and sexual naïveté, The Young Girl's Handbook of Good Manners is still as apt and amusing as it was almost a century ago. 51StevenTXJan 23, 2012, 10:45am
Category 7: War, Violence and Conflict Red Sorghum: A Novel of China by Mo YanFirst published in Chinese 1987 English translation by Howard Goldblatt 1993   "Over decades that seem but a moment in time, lines of scarlet figures shuttled among the sorghum stalks to weave a vast human tapestry. They killed, they looted, and they defended their country in a valiant, stirring ballet that makes us unfilial descendants who now occupy the land pale by comparison. Surrounded by progress, I feel a nagging sense of our species' regression." Thus the narrator of Mo Yan's novel states the theme of Red Sorghum. The setting for the novel is the author's native village of Northeast Gaomi Township in the province of Shandong near the tip of the Chinese peninsula that points toward Korea. Most of the events in the novel take place between 1923 and 1941. During the first part of that period the region was loosely governed by one of China's many warlords. In 1937 the Japanese occupied the province, leading to years of violent repression and resistance. The narrative timeline is complex. The first-person narrator revisits his home town in the 1980s to construct his family's history. He begins his account in 1939 as his father, a teenage boy at the time, is preparing to participate in a partisan ambush of a Japanese convoy. This battle will be the central event in the novel. The story then shifts back to 1923 for the marriage of the narrator's paternal grandmother. These shifts in time occur frequently throughout the novel as though the principal characters are remembering their past, with the 1939-1941 timeline being the principal one. Though the characters' proper names are given, they are chiefly referred to by relationship as "Granddad," "Grandma," "Father," "Little Auntie," etc., thus reaffirming the narrator's invisible presence. Grandma, a remarkably strong and free-spirited woman, inherits a distillery while still a teenage girl and proves more than equal to the task of managing it. Granddad, a large and violent man, begins his career while still a boy by murdering his mother's lover, then alternates between manual labor and banditry until emerging as a feared guerrilla warrior after the Japanese invasion. The relationship between these two is both passionate and tempestuous. Violence and passion prevail in this story of remarkable heroism, brutality, treachery and suffering. When the Chinese partisan bands aren't fighting the Japanese, they are fighting each other for control of weapons and food supplies. The primitive, defiant individualism and amorality of Granddad and his contemporaries brings to mind the Old West of Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian. Mo Yan's style of writing verges on magical realism, with its sensuality and capriciousness, but there is nothing disarmingly "magic" about it. The environment is a real as it can be, with every scene oozing blood, sweat, mud, pus, sap or semen. Red Sorghum is a harrowing, earthy and unforgettable immersion in the violent and tragic lives of its characters.
Great review of Red Sorghum, one of my favourite books. I had not heard of it and only tracked it down after seeing the film and have been a fan of the author ever since. Goldblatt's translations always read well too. I have no Chinese, so have no idea of their veracity, but they sound authentic. I thought The End of the Affair was a very Greene sort of book, so the choice to me seemed fitting. Your review of The Savage Detectives has sent me back to this book, which I had been struggling through (not sure of the reasons for the struggle), so I will approach it now with your ideas in mind. As >36 says, your thread is dangerous! Based on the books you have listed that I have already read, I know I will enjoy those you have listed that I am not familiar with.
Category 1: Love, Romance and Sex Vox by Nicholson BakerFirst published 1992   A man and a woman each dial a phone sex service and are randomly connected with one another. The novel consists entirely of one long conversation between them. They get acquainted, explore each other's tastes and interests, then share some of their sexual fantasies and experiences. Finally, speaking alternately, they jointly construct a scenario for their mutual sexual gratification using what they have learned about the other to maximum effect. Nothing exists outside the dialog in this novel, so all interpretation is left up to the reader. It can be taken as an example of the powers of language and the imagination, as two perfect strangers using only their voices open up so fully and construct a gratifying relationship. Or it can be read as a grim commentary on the loneliness of modern life, when two apparently intelligent and likable people can only find rapport through such mechanical and anonymous methods. I found it to be more of the latter, and a reminder of how difficult our inhibitions make it for people to establish trust and find pleasure in one another. In the 20 years since the novel was published we've certainly seen a trend for people to retreat behind the anonymity of the Internet, probably at the cost of having more fulfilling interpersonal relationships.
Category 10: Horror and Mystery The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner by James HoggFirst published 1824 Read ebook from Project Gutenberg  The novel begins with an "editor's introduction" that tells of a Scots family in the early 18th century. A fun-loving laird unwisely takes a puritanical young bride. The couple never reconcile their differences and eventually separate, but not before the birth of two sons. The elder, George, is a fine and cheerful lad, the image of his doting father. The younger, Robert, bears his mother's dour temperament (and a close resemblance to her Calvinist minister). The two boys are raised separately, finally coming into contact as young men. Their meeting is followed by a series of tragic murders, disappearances, and mysterious phenomena. After this framing narrative comes the body of the work, the "sinner's" memoir, which tells the story over again from the perspective of one of its characters. Key to the work is the Calvinist idea of predestination, which holds that divine grace rather than good works is the key to salvation. The author, without delving into theological concepts, deplores the self-righteousness of those who deem themselves among the saved and think this gives them license to despise others. The Confessions is a gothic novel in its use of mystery, suspense and the supernatural. It is quite gripping at times, and very entertaining. It's also quite refreshing to find an author of that era who, instead of deploring the dissolute lifestyle of the libertine, prefers it to the priggish arrogance of the self-righteous. 55StevenTXJan 28, 2012, 10:14pm
Category 12: Comedy and Satire Exercises in Style by Raymond QueneauFirst published in French 1947 English translation by Barbara Wright 1958   Two men stand next to each other on a crowded Paris bus. The younger one has a long neck and a hat with a cord around the crown instead of a ribbon. He accuses the other of deliberately stepping on his toes, but the altercation goes no further as he grabs an empty seat. Two hours later we see the same young man with a friend who tells him that the top button of his overcoat should be placed higher. This simple and meaningless story is told a total of 99 times in the manner of a baroque theme and variations. Each telling follows a theme either in its form, perspective, or use of language. There is, for example, the telegraph message. There is one in Cockney slang. There is one as the libretto of an opera. There is one using botanical images and metaphors. There are variations with letters and words transposed. My favorite, titled "Hellenisms," uses manufactured words with Greek roots: "In a hyperomnibus full of petrolonauts in a chronia of metarush I was a martyr to this microrama..." Exercises in Style is a marvelous and entertaining display of the flexibility of language and the way that it becomes part of the story. 57psuttoJan 29, 2012, 4:15pm
Confessions of a justified sinner has been on my shelf for a few years now, good to see you enjoyed it means its more likely to be read sooner than later 58StevenTXJan 29, 2012, 10:20pm
Category 8: A Sense of Place The Return of Philip Latinowicz by Miroslav KrležaFirst published in Serbo-Croatian 1932 English translation by Zora Depolo 1959   Forty-year-old Philip Latinowicz, a painter and art critic, finding himself dispirited and void of inspiration, returns to the home he hasn't seen in 23 years. His memories of his past there are troubled. His mother, always cold and distant, refused to tell Philip who his father was. Yet when he returned home after a night of carousing, she condemned his immorality and refused to open the door to him, sending him out into the world alone while still a teenager. The village of Kostanjevec to which he returns is in eastern Croatia. It is in a state of decay following the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918. Philip is at times dismayed by the squalor and ignorance of the common people, as well as by the haughty irrelevance of aristocrats living on memories of lost grandeur. At other times he is invigorated by the simple pleasures of rural life and the beauties of nature. Ultimately Philip's solitary reverie is replaced by a tempestuous daily relationship with a circle of troubled people like himself, at the center of which is Xenia, a femme fatale who seems to keep around her the shattered remnants of the men she has ruined like the drained carcasses of flies in a spider's web. Much of the novel consists of dialog in which one of these men challenges Philip's romantic view of the world and the very nature and purpose of his art. As a novel of ideas coming out of a society in decay and disillusionment, this is not a cheerful or optimistic book. The questions it raises, however, about art, morality, and civilization in general are still relevant.
a femme fatale who seems to keep around her the shattered remnants of the men she has ruined like the drained carcasses of flies in a spider's web. Oh! This makes me curious about this book. 60StevenTXJan 30, 2012, 12:23am
#59 - The following quote may entice you further, but do keep in mind that this a character who appears only in the second half of the novel, and we hear more of her lovers than of Xenia herself:
"Xenia, who was then by everybody called Babocka, was in her twenty-seventh year. She had the sleek long head of a Borzoi on a fragile, slender body. Fair-haired with deep shining eyes, she used her delicate, sharply-cut lips shrewdly and sensitively: from those pale, moist lips of hers flagrant and poisonous lies flowed like sheer poetry. Her body, a vessel of deep and obscure passions, was hermaphrodite, yet appeared the pure body of a girl on the threshold of her first spring. She blossomed like a cankered flower; her perfumes of wet, decaying hay, her opium-sprinkled cigarettes, and her broken contralto voice clouded in thick smoke, floated round the heads of the first and second generations of our newly established gentry like some mysterious incense."
Whoa! I may have to pick up the second half of the novel... & want to know if the author knew that Borzois have the reputation of being nearly the dumbest dog on the globe. They are topped only by Afghan Hounds, but they are pretty.
Don't know if the ebook gives this info, but "Justified" in Scots also has the meaning of executed.
No, it doesn't. That's interesting, because either meaning could work. 64StevenTXJan 31, 2012, 12:57pm
Category 10: Horror and Mystery Rashōmon and 17 Other Stories by Ryūnosuke AkutagawaRashōmon first published in Japanese 1915, other stories through 1927 (posthumous) English translation by Jay Rubin 2006   Akutagawa Ryūnosuke--to put his name in proper Japanese order--lived from 1892 to 1926. He was born into poverty, but nonetheless achieved a high level of education, mastering both English and Chinese. His maturation as a writer came during Japan's Taishō Era, 1912-1926, a brief episode of cultural openness and artistic flowering. His writing reflects, on the one hand, the bright but fragile temper of the time, and on the other his own troubled and divided soul. The stories of Akutagawa are divided thematically in this collection into four groups. The first section, "A World in Decay," includes his most famous story, Rashōmon. These are dark and magical tales of Japan's past that, at the same time, reflect a confidence in the power of a writer's artistic vision. The most memorable of these stories is "Hell Screen," in which an artist commissioned to paint a picture of Hell compulsively, but knowingly, draws himself into the very Hell he is painting. The second group of stories, subtitled "Under the Sword," continues the historical setting, but in a starkly realistic mode. The theme here is faith and loyalty against a background of religious or political change. Akutagawa's writings were heavily influenced by Christianity, and several of his stories feature Japanese Christians being persecuted for their beliefs. These were written at a time when Japan was politically divided over the issue of Western cultural influence. Next is a short selection of stories called "Modern Tragicomedy," in which we see Akutagawa at his most cheerful and playful, writing satirically of Japanese life in the 1920s. In "Horse Legs" a clerical error on the part of some bureaucratic divine authority has killed a man before his allotted time. He is brought back to life with apologies, but since his legs had already begun to decompose he is given a pair of horse's legs instead. In "Green Onions" the focus of the story isn't the plot itself, but the author's need to finish it before his deadline. The final segment is a series of autobiographical stories Akutagawa wrote in his final months, some of which were not published until after his death. These are grim and troubled stories reflecting the author's tragic life. His mother was insane, an insanity he always feared he had inherited. He was raised by foster parents, having little contact with his natural father, and as a sickly child in a society prizing martial virtues he was ostracized by his teachers as well as his fellow students. Yet his early love for literature and his intellectual accomplishments made him contemptuous of others even as he was hurt by their rejection of him. Similar internal conflicts developed over religion and sex, as he flirted with Christianity and had several extra-marital affairs. Akutagawa's final story, "Slipping Gears," reads like an extended suicide note. He felt himself slipping into madness--parts of the story itself seem deranged--and finished: "--I don't have the strength to keep writing this. To go on living with this feeling is painful beyond description. Isn't there someone kind enough to strangle me in my sleep?" On 24 July, 1927, Akutagawa took an overdose of sedative and died in his sleep. Akutagawa read widely in the Western classics, and his works are sprinkled with references to authors such as Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, and Flaubert, just as to the Japanese and Chinese classics. This, plus his association with Christianity, makes his stories particularly approachable by Western readers. The Penguin edition is abundantly footnoted to provide the necessary background material on Japanese history and Asian literature. This collection is an excellent introduction to modern Japanese literature.
Category 10: Horror and Mystery The Mystery of Edwin Drood by Charles DickensSerialized 1870, unfinished Read ebook from Project Gutenberg   Alas! we shall never know the true fate of Edwin Drood, or whether the one who acts with obvious villainy is truly the villain. Nor shall we know which of several potential suitors, if any, eventually wins the hand of the beautiful but delicate Miss Rose Bud. What sinisters purpose was served by Jasper's midnight visit to the crypt? And is the inquisitive Mr. Datchery a detective, a blackmailer, or neither? From its opening scene in a London opium den, it's apparent that The Mystery of Edwin Drood was to have been a shade darker than Dickens' previous novels and more akin to the "sensation novels" of Wilkie Collins. Yet it is still suffused with Dickens' startling wit and peopled with his unique and lovable eccentrics. It's such a shame that he died with the second half of the novel unwritten.  66mamzelFeb 3, 2012, 3:53pm
Monsieur and I went to see this on Broadway decades ago. They gave the audience a chance to vote on how it should end. 67StevenTXEdited: Feb 11, 2012, 12:11am
Category 12: Comedy and Satire The Adventures of Telemachus by Louis AragonFirst published 1922 as Les Aventures de TélémaqueTranslated by Renée Riese Hubert and Judd D. Hubert 1988    Louis Aragon's Dadaist novel is a farcical exploration of the ideas of self, language, time, and freedom. The simple plot is a visit by Telemachus, searching for his lost father Ulysses, to the island of the nymph Calypso. Telemachus is accompanied by Mentor, who is actually the goddess Minerva disguised as an old man. Much of the novel is simply the exposition of ideas and the play of language with no particular relevance to what is happening. For example, Telemachus speaks: Everything that is not myself is incomprehensible.... Language, contrary to all appearances, consists merely of I; and any word I repeat casts off everything that is not me until it becomes an organic noise through which my life is displayed. There is only myself in the world, and if from time to time I am weak enough to believe in the existence of a woman, I need only to bend over her breast to hear the pounding of my heart and recognize myself. Feelings are no more than languages that facilitate the practices of certain functions. A contrasting sense of identity is later expressed by one of the water sprites that attends Calypso: If you wish to answer for someone you assert: I am as sure of him as myself. Now, the one person in the world about whom I can have no psychological assurance is myself. The law of my being eludes me.... At every moment I betray myself, I fail to keep my own word, I contradict myself. I am not the person in whom I would place my confidence. Another theme running throughout the novel is the imperative for rebellion and non-conformity, usually expressed by Mentor: As soon as we obey, do we obey ourselves?... They made laws, ethics, æsthetics to instill in you the respect of frail objects. Whatever is frail is fair game for breakage. Try your strength just once; after that I dare you not to continue. Whatever you cannot break will break you, will be your master. Shatter sacrosanct ideas, anything that brings tears to the eyes, shatter, shatter. And for an example of the play of language: In the nutcracker of your arms love breaks with the clouds, men's teeth under my fist, dried out trees spouting harsh language, broad panels of rough silk torn like chimeras, mechanical smokes, perfumes of the swamps. Much of The Adventures of Telemachus is probably not intended to make any sense except as an experience in novel images and forms of expression. It is that, as well as an amusing challenge to conventional thinking.
Category 3: Rites of Passage The Sense of an Ending by Julian BarnesFirst published 2011, winner of the Booker Prize   This is a short but intense and deeply affecting novel about memory and the way we construct our own past. The narrator, a man in his 60s, first tells of his youth, his friends, and his first girlfriend as he remembers them. Then, in the second half of the novel, comes an event that forces him to reinterpret his past and re-evaluate his own character.
Category 7: War, Violence and Conflict A Question of Power by Bessie HeadFirst published 1974   A Question of Power is a semi-autobiographical novel. The protagonist, a woman named Elizabeth, like the author is born in apartheid South Africa to a white mother and black father. She emigrates to Botswana, taking up residence in a large village. Elizabeth tries various avocations, but discovers that her true love is gardening, and she begins to work on an experimental farm under the tutelage of a cadre of Danish volunteers. But even as Elizabeth attains some material stability in her life, her mental state deteriorates as she suffers debilitating dreams and hallucinations. Her mind becomes a battleground between two elements represented by two men, Sello and Dan. Sello represents, roughly, the traditional, tribal and mystical side of her environment, Dan the nationalistic, modern and hedonistic. But there are also religious references drawn from paganism, Christianity, Buddhism, Hindu and Islam. The two specters assume opposite poles in any number of spiritual frames of reference in dialogues and images often filled with sexual references and symbols. Eventually Elizabeth's only path to sanity is through a humanistic rejection of all notions of an external god. I found it difficult to follow most of Elizabeth's dream images or visions, as they were simply too chaotic. It might be possible to see her insanity as a product of apartheid and her divided mental state as a reflection of an Africa torn between traditional and modern cultural values, but the story isn't coherent enough to infer such a political or social interpretation with any confidence. The evils that torment Elizabeth may have originated with racism, but Elizabeth's spiritual conflict is more generalized to the larger notions of good and evil, God and Man. This is an interesting but very challenging novel.
Category 8: A Sense of Place Some Prefer Nettles by Jun'ichirō TanizakiFirst published in Japanese 1928-29 English translation by Edward G. Seidensticker 1955   Some Prefer Nettles is the story of a Japanese couple living in Osaka in the 1920s and caught between the cultural tides of East and West. Kaname is a man intrigued by Western ideas, especially sexual liberalism. When his love for his wife Misako had faded away, he even encouraged her to take a lover as he visits a Eurasian prostitute. For two years now the couple have been ready to divorce, but have held back from fear of change, from fear of facing family members, and to protect their young son. Misako's father is the relative who's opinion matters the most, and, almost as if sensing what is developing, he attempts to draw them back to their Japanese roots by exposing them more to cultural traditions, in particular the puppet theater. Misako herself resists, but Kaname is drawn into an appreciation for his heritage as he accompanies his father-in-law on a rural pilgrimage to a puppet theater festival. The widowed father-in-law brings along his submissive young mistress, O-hisa, as though to demonstrate to Kaname what an appropriate Japanese male-female relationship should be. This beautifully written novel shows a man torn between contrasting elements that pull his affections and emotions in opposite directions. It depicts as well a country torn between the subtle and refined pleasures of its past and the sensuous allure of Western cultural influences. 71mamzelFeb 10, 2012, 10:49am
Adding this one to my wish list. Sounds interesting, even the puppets.
I really appreciate how you take the extra time to put a picture of the author alongside the book cover. It helps to put a face to the name.
I really appreciate how you take the extra time to put a picture of the author alongside the book cover. It helps to put a face to the name.I confessed the reason for this last year on my Club Read thread. After I read Snakes and Earrings by Hitomi Kanehara I couldn't resist including her picture with my review because she is just so doggone gorgeous. Rather than reveal myself to be just a lecherous old man, I had to start including all the other authors' pictures as well. ;-) 73mamzelFeb 11, 2012, 2:35pm
Ah, ha! The truth is out. No matter. It's appreciated.
That's funny! I could not figure out how to post pictures. 75StevenTXFeb 11, 2012, 10:02pm
Category 2: Families The Living and the Dead by Patrick WhiteFirst published 1941   Set in London in the 1930s, The Living and the Dead is the story of Catherine Standish and her two adult children, Elyot and Eden. They are three individuals living behind emotional barriers, seldom able to empathize or give themselves fully to love. There are also class barriers involved, as each increasingly finds her or his upper class status more of a burden than a privilege. Each eventually comes to question the purpose of life, seeking answers--or escape--in different directions. The novel focuses not on events, but on feelings. White writes from deep inside the psyche of each of his characters in insightful, analytic prose. This is a thoughtful, but slow-paced novel, and the author's turgid style does not make it easy to read. The absence of quotation marks is only occasionally confusing, but White's frequent use of second person (suddenly it is "You took the train..." instead of Elyot or Eden) just calls attention to how the author is writing, not what he is saying. The characters are well-crafted, and there are beautifully-written passages throughout the book, but I found this bleak, uneventful and difficult novel on the whole unrewarding.
Oh well. Good review of The Living and the Dead but you've convinced me not to read it. Better luck with your next book! 77StevenTXFeb 13, 2012, 11:33pm
Category 1: Love, Romance and Sex Two Novels: J and Seventeen by Kenzaburō ŌeSeventeen first published 1961 J first published 1963 Translated by Luk Van Haute   The two short novels in this volume have in common society's judgment of the individual. In each case a person who has engaged in disapproved sexual behavior pushes back against society in a self-destructive manner. "J" is the nickname of a wealthy young man. As the novel opens he is in a speeding car heading toward a remote Japanese fishing village. Everyone in the car but the driver is drunk, and one of the women is naked. Passing through the village in the dark of night they suddenly come upon a crowd gathered silently outside a house. It is the village populace expressing its collective disapproval of an adulteress by simply staring at her window throughout the night. J and his companions are on their way to his vacation home where they will make an avant-garde film, but not before continuing their drunken orgy. The villagers' unspoken condemnation will haunt them, however, when sobriety sets in. In the second half of the novel, J, now back in Tokyo, is obsessed with the need to take sexual risks by becoming a "chikan," a subway molester. Gradually he comes to realize that the thrill in the sexual act is not getting away with it, but in the sure knowledge that he will eventually be caught. In Seventeen an unnamed young man turns 17-years-old on the emotional roller coaster of adolescence. He is an habitual masturbator, and oscillates between euphoria and guilt. This happens to be at a time of intense internal political division in Japan, and while the young man has previously been somewhat left-wing in his ideas, he is suddenly and dramatically drawn into a far-right political movement as a catharsis for his sexual guilt. The implication for Japanese readers at the time is that the young onanist is Otoya Yamaguchi, a 17-year-old zealot who assassinated the head of the Japan Socialist Party on October 12, 1960. His representation of one of their martyrs as a sexual deviant earned Ōe the enmity of the political Right and caused the author for some years to fear for his personal safety. These are two excellent novels that explore the relationship between social boundaries and personal guilt. 78StevenTXFeb 17, 2012, 11:12pm
Category 6: Adventure Callirhoe by Chariton, and
An Ephesian Story: Anthia and Habrocomes by Xenophon of Ephesus
from Two Novels of Ancient GreeceBoth novels Hellenistic Greek from 1st or 2nd Century Translation by Stephen M. Trzaskoma 2010   The two works in this volume are the oldest known pieces of prose fiction to which we might reasonably apply the term "novels." Some scholars prefer the term "romances," but by either name they represent the emergence of the narrative form that now dominates our literature. Nothing whatsoever is known about the two authors except what can be deduced from these two works: that they both lived in the Hellenistic world sometime around the end of the 1st Century. Though there is no direct link between them, the two stories have remarkably similar plots, suggesting perhaps a common oral tradition leading to a number of variations and imitations. In both stories a young Greek couple, each one being of striking physical beauty, meets and marries. Soon, however, misfortune strikes, separating them and sending each on a perilous odyssey across the Mediterranean, not knowing if their beloved spouse is alive or dead. In each case the young lady is taken for dead at one point and wakes to find herself in a tomb. In each story the young man is crucified for a crime of which he is innocent, only to be rescued at the last minute. Callirhoe is the longer, more elaborate, and much the better of the two stories. It is set at the end of the Peloponnesian War and begins in Sicily in the city of Syracuse, which is celebrating its great victory over the Athenians. Callirhoe, the daughter of the city's greatest general, has come of age and is so beautiful that suitors are besieging her home for her hand. Not among them is Chaireas, the most handsome youth and son of the second most powerful man in Syracuse, because their respective fathers are political rivals. But when the two accidentally meet, it is love at first sight. With surprising ease the two fathers are reconciled and the blissful couple are soon married. The jealous suitors, however, resentful of having been upstaged by a newcomer, lay a plot to convince Chaireas that his bride is unfaithful to him. Enraged, Chaireas kicks Callirhoe in the belly, knocking the wind out of her so effectively that everyone assumes she is dead. Learning that he has been deceived, Chaireas can barely be restrained from killing himself as his young wife is laid to rest, surrounded by gold and silver. Hours later, of course, Callirhoe snaps back to life finding herself helplessly entombed. No one can hear her cries for help, but fortunately a band of grave robbers are tunneling their way in to get the gold. When they find the tomb's occupant alive and unharmed, they resolve to take her too, knowing she'll fetch a great price at some distant slave market. The next morning Chaireas finds the tomb emptied, the body gone, and resolves to go in search of his wife, be she dead or alive. Thus begin the wanderings of Callirhoe and Chaireas. They will criss-cross the Mediterranean, be sold as slaves one minute, befriended by kings and princes the next. Callirhoe's phenomenal beauty will only grow in power and reputation, as entire cities turn out just to get a glimpse of her. She is like Frodo's Ring of Power--every man who sees her, covets her, and he who holds her is consumed by jealousy. Eventually the pair travel as far as Persian Babylon, but armies will march, cities will fall, and fleets will be destroyed before they can hope of being reunited. Xenophon's story of Anthia and Habrocomes follows a similar outline, though it is both shorter and smaller in scale. Anthia is the prettiest girl in Ephesus, Habrocomes the handsomest boy. They fall so madly in love with each other that they become physically ill. Their two fathers have to resort to an oracle to figure out that the two are in love. The prophecy also has some cryptic and disturbing language about "terrible sufferings," "endless troubles," and "calamities" that await them, but says all will come right in the end. So the two are married and, in hopes of escaping the predicted calamities, the parents send them off on a honeymoon trip to Egypt. As their ship disappears from view, the none-too-bright parents recall the words of the oracle: "Both will flee across the sea, driven by madness, will face chains among men with the sea in their veins." Sure enough, their ship is taken by pirates, they are sold into slavery, and begin their separate odysseys. Anthia's beauty may not topple kingdoms, but it is enough to get her both into and out of some terrible scrapes. She, of course, must face the obligatory ordeal of the tomb, not to mention being hung up in a tree for target practice, thrown into a pit with wild dogs, and sold to a pimp. Habrocomes will have his crucifixion, a burning at the stake, and a spell in an Italian stone quarry. Bizarre coincidences rule (thanks to the gods' interference, no doubt). Anthia will be captured on three different continents by the same bandit! The two novels survived from antiquity as part of the same, single manuscript. Despite the similar plots, there are some interesting differences. In Xenophon's story, which is set at an unspecified time but also in Classical Greece, both homosexual and heterosexual love are mentioned, while in Callirhoe there is no hint that homosexual relationships were both common and accepted at that time. In An Ephesian Story the characters pray and sacrifice to whichever god happens to be the patron of the city in which they find themselves, whereas in Chariton's novel it is always, and only, the goddess Aphrodite, no matter where they go. Moreover, Callirhoe's piety is repeatedly pointed out, and the goddess of love is given a distinctly and uncharacteristically chaste demeanor. If the antiquity of the manuscript weren't well established, one might suspect a Christian re-working of the tale. In fact, if you were to substitute the Virgin Mary for Aphrodite and give Chaireas a horse, you might easily pass the Callirhoe off as a medieval romance from a millennium later. The introduction by translator Stephen M. Trzaskoma is excellent, and his translation strikes an appropriate balance between flavor and readability, making both novels--but especially Callirhoe--a joy to read.
It's time for all new artwork for my 12 categories. Go to the top of the page and scroll down.
The artwork is great! As for your Greek tales, sounds like Shakespeare borrowed. I was thinking Romeo & Juliet meets Candide as I was reading your interesting review.
I was thinking Romeo & Juliet meets Candide
I had exactly the same thought as I read the book. 82lkernaghFeb 25, 2012, 12:14am
Love the choices for the new artwork!
Category 6: Adventure Aethiopica by Heliodorus of EmesaAlso known as The Adventures of Theagenes and Chariclea2nd Century Phoenician writing in Greek  Aethiopica is one of the five surviving Greek novels or romances from the Hellenistic Era. It is closely related in concept to the two described above, Callirhoe and An Ephesian Story, but longer and told in a more complex style and form. The novel begins with the aftermath of some strange catastrophe which has left almost an entire ship's crew dead on the shores of Egypt. It appears at first that the only one living is a beautiful maiden named Chariclea, but soon she finds her beloved is still alive, an equally attractive young man named Theagenes. Scarcely are they united when a band of brigands chances upon them, takes them captive, and plunders the ship, taking the two lovers as slaves. Heliodorus, the author, quotes Homer often enough to make it obvious that he has taken The Odyssey as his model, starting his narrative in mid-story and having his characters relate their past adventures in long sessions with their new acquaintances. We learn that Chariclea was a priestess of Delphi who only recently learned herself that she is actually an Ethiopian princess. Her mother the queen, it seems, stared too long at a painting of Andromeda while she was pregnant and thus gave birth to a white-skinned, blonde daughter. Fearing that her husband would accuse her of infidelity, she sent her daughter away while claiming that the child was stillborn. As a priestess, Chariclea was sworn to chastity until she met Theagenes (as pictured above), a noble youth from Thessaly. It was love at first sight for both. She agrees to marry him, but insists on remaining a virgin until she has returned with Theagenes to her Ethiopian birthplace. This they will accomplish with the aid of an Egyptian priest who has been seeking Chariclea and appears at just the right moment to mastermind their elopement. Fortuitous coincidences occur right and left (obviously the work of the gods), and several more major characters appear whose histories, when told, intertwine with those of the loving couple. There will be battles, conflagrations, floods, dungeons, poisonings, and more for the pair to endure. Naturally every man who sees Chariclea falls in love with her and wants to seize her for himself, but none will be as dangerous as the Persian princess Arsace who tries to seduce Theagenes. I read this novel from two different translations, both as ebooks in public domain from Google Books. I started with an edition from 1897 published by The Athenian Society. The translator was not named, but it was a very readable rendition and--as the original Greek was given on facing pages--presumably a faithful one. It turned out, however, that this was only the first of several volumes, but Google hadn't digitized the rest. So I found another translation on Google, this one in an edition titled The Greek Romances of Heliodorus, Longus, and Achillies Tatius, published 1889 and translated by Rev. Rowland Smith of Oxford. This translation was a bit more turgid, but acceptable. Because I read the novel from two different sources, I'm not posting this as a formal review. (The only edition available on Amazon, by the way, is a translation made by Thomas Underdown in 1587.) This was, incidentally, my first experience using my NookColor to read ebooks that were PDF files of page images rather than OCR'd text. I can discuss this aspect further if anyone is interested. The Aethiopica is entertaining, but I wouldn't put it in the same class as Chariton's Callirhoe. The characters aren't as appealing or realistic and the narrative isn't as suspenseful. The best part of the book, in my opinion, was a fascinating description of the siege of the city of Syene (modern Aswan) and a subsequent battle in the desert featuring Persian armored cavalry against Ethiopian elephants and various African auxiliaries. And speaking of sieges, Heliodorus the author, who identifies himself as a Phoenician, was from the Syrian city of Emesa. It is now known as Homs, and is under siege at this moment. 84StevenTXEdited: Feb 26, 2012, 4:56pm
Category 12: Comedy and Satire Selected Stories of Lu HsunEighteen stories first published 1918-1926 Translation by Yang Hsien-yi and Gladys Yang 1972   Lu Xun was the most prominent Chinese writer of the first half of the 20th century. His writings reflect a time of transition between ancient traditions and modern ways and the political turmoil following the final collapse of dynastic rule. Lu's beliefs were progressive and socialist, but with strong sympathy for the common person trapped in the values and practices of an archaic tradition. There is considerable variety in the stories this collection, ranging from light political satires, to dark cultural allegories, and to poignant personal tragedies. The settings also vary: urban-rural, past-present, realistic-imaginary. The collection is arranged chronologically, and the general trend is from the general and political in the earlier stories to the intimate and personal in the later ones. The opening selection, "A Madman's Diary," is an allegorical depiction of feudalism through the thoughts of a man obsessed with cannibalism. Like many of Lu's stories it shows the influence of Nikolai Gogol in its use of the absurd and fantastic. Lu's most famous story, and the longest in the collection, is "The True Story of Ah Q." Ah Q is a shiftless simpleton who gets caught up in the political rivalries between nationalist and socialist factions in rural China. He's only looking for his next meal, but he finds himself one day a pariah, the next a hero, the next a criminal depending on how the political winds are blowing. This is a superb double-edged satire, both showing the need for social reform and poking fun at the selfish motives of the supposed reformers. Several of the stories focus on the status of women in China. It was a time when girls in rural areas were still having their feet bound and might be sold as concubines, while women in urban China attended college, wore Western dress and started careers. Institutions and attitudes were slow to adapt. "Regret for the Past" depicts the struggles of a couple who--for reasons never given--decide to live together unmarried. The strain of society's disapproval eventually drives them into poverty and dooms their relationship. In "Divorce," a woman with modern attitudes is forced to go through an archaic divorce process by submitting her case to the village sage. The final story in the collection, "Forging the Swords," is an allegorical attack on aristocratic tradition in the mode of (and referencing) Hans Christian Andersen's tale "The Emperor's New Clothes." It has a macabre twist to it, however, featuring two severed heads fighting one another in a cauldron of boiling water as a third man beheads himself so his head can join the fray. This is one of several stories in which Lu Xun resembles his European contemporary Franz Kafka. This collection was published in 2003, but the translations are not new. They were first published in Beijing in 1972 before the use of the new Pinyin system of romanization became standard. Thus the author's name is given as "Lu Hsun" rather than "Lu Xun," and the names of characters and places are similarly spelled under the old Wade-Giles system. This is the only drawback to the translation, which I found perfectly readable. The 2003 edition includes an introduction by Ha Jin which provides useful biographical information and an assessment of Lu Xun's place in Chinese literary tradition. 85StevenTXFeb 26, 2012, 10:41pm
Category 5: Making It Heavy Wings by Zhang JieFirst published in China 1980 as Chenzhong de chibangAlso published as Leaden WingsEnglish translation by Howard Goldblatt 1989   China in 1980 was in a difficult period of economic and social transition. Zhang Jie described it as it was happening in her novel Heavy Wings. The setting is Beijing, and the principal characters are mostly workers or executives with either the Morning Light Auto Works or the Ministry of Heavy Industry which oversees it. The key conflict is a dispute in management philosophy which basically boils down to the question: "Does the worker serve the state, or does the state serve the worker?" Chen Yongming, the manager of Morning Light Auto Works, believes that happy workers are better workers, and that giving employees some autonomy improves production and quality. He has taken risks like diverting funds to build housing for his employees, and those risks are paying off. A cadre member of the Ministry of Heavy Industry named He Jiabin, excited about what Chen has done, collaborates with a journalist to publish an article praising Chen's new philosophy. The publicity generated by the article soon pits two senior members of the ministry against each other, with each attempting to represent his views as the proper expression of Marxist doctrine. He Jiabin's superior and supporter, Vice-Minister Zheng Ziyun, bears the brunt of the power struggle and emerges as the novel's chief protagonist. The conflict reverberates up and down the management chain and into the personal lives of those involved. Zheng's opponents attempt to slander him by implying an illicit relationship between Zheng and the female reporter who co-authored the infamous article. At the same time, Zheng is having trouble at home with his callous, unloving wife, and his rebellious daughter. The role of women is a major theme in the novel, with the puritanical ideals of officialdom coming under heavy criticism as well. An unmarried couple seen together is a scandal, and a successful woman is sneeringly assumed to have used sex to achieve her position. And where did Marx write, wonders one character, that a man may not kiss his wife in public? That Heavy Wings was published in China in 1980 to wide acclaim shows that Zhang Jie caught the mood of the moment quite accurately and at a time when China's leaders were open to the ideas represented in the novel. The sense of the uncertainty about the future that the populace and its government must have felt is expressed in the following passage when He Jiabin comforts a woman he has loved secretly for years but has never been able to marry, or even dared to kiss, because of political issues in her past: "Oh Jiabin, Jiabin, why has everything turned out so badly?"
He pats her on the back. "Because we're living in a society that's neither capitalist nor communist, neither fish nor fowl, neither this nor that, neither hot nor cold, always at odds, up and down, where nothing is as it should be, and everything can be interpreted one way or the other. No one ever knows which way to go, and nothing's ever made clear. So why should your own agony be more important than the agonies of an entire society?... It's not the fault of any one person. These are the pains that come during a time of transition." Zhang Jie is obviously at pains herself not to imply any criticism of Chairman Deng Xiaoping or the Communist Party in her novel. It does not promote capitalism, just a reform of management practices and social attitudes under communism. Obviously China was soon to evolve in ways that vastly exceeded the reforms promoted in the novel. While Heavy Wings is a very rewarding and informative novel, it is anything but lively. There are so many characters introduced in successive chapters that the novel at first reads like a series of loosely linked short stories. And the lengthy discussions of management practices often make it seem more like a case study in a textbook on organizational psychology. The more human side of the story only comes to the fore in the last third of the novel when the philosophical cases have all been made and the effects of conflict and stress take their toll on the rivals and their families. I would recommend it especially to those with an interest in recent Chinese history and not just looking for entertainment.
A fascinating period in China, so I will give it a try. If a Goldblatt translation can't liven it up, it must have been earnest indeed.
I found a reference last week to a book called Rhetoric of the Chinese Cultural Revolution by Lu Xing, published in 2004. While the GPCR ended just before your book, the author would still be heavily influenced by this rhetorical tradition, especially the contortions involved in not criticizing or promoting a particular path or person, so perhaps she was being particularly cautious, given as you say, no one knew which way things would go
I also really enjoyed your Lu Hsun/Xun review and will look for that as well.
Category 8: A Sense of Place Room by Emma DonoghueFirst published 2010   With over 400 reviews already posted about Room, I'm not doing a full review on this one. I don't think I could do it justice without giving away too much of the plot anyway. Briefly, the situation is that a boy has spent his first five years in a single room where his mother has been held captive. They have a television and a few books, so the child knows something of the outside world, even though he thinks it's all make believe. The boy, whose name is Jack, is the narrator of the story. For Jack, "Room" is the whole world, and he associates it warmly with the love he and his mother share. For her, however, it is a prison. Their contrasting perspectives are one theme of the novel. Another is Jack's use of language with no direct knowledge of the objects, activities and ideas it represents. Room is a gripping and moving novel for at least two-thirds of the way through. Towards the end it fell a bit flat for me, with the author seeming too intent on finding "closure" at the expense of carrying out the psychological and linguistic ideas which she built so well in the beginning of the book. It's still a very good novel, though, and many readers will no doubt be pleased with the ending. 88xueshengEdited: Mar 1, 2012, 9:43pm
Nice reviews on Lu Xun's work and Heavy Wings. I've had a bilingual version of Ah Q on my shelf for some time in the hopes that my Chinese literacy would improve enough to read that side of the page. Alas, I will have to read the English side for now. I hadn't heard of Heavy Wings before, so now I have a new one for my TBR.
Heavy Wings sounds like an interesting look at China's culture, but I'll take your warning seriously that it isn't lively. It sounds like it might get bogged down with politics. Even with the warning, it's going onto the WL not for this year, but perhaps for a year where China is my country focus.
cammykitty, I see that you are also a member of the Reading Globally group, so you may know that we are doing a China focus in the fourth quarter of this year. I will be one of the discussion leaders, and Heavy Wings is part of the background reading I've been doing. I hope you can join us but, if not, there will still be lots of additional ideas for your wishlist.
Ah, so you're getting prepared. I might be able to fit a few books in 4th quarter. Just remind me! It sounds really cool. I don't spend a lot of time in Reading Globally, but I pick an area to focus on each year and will stop by that thread. This year my focus is the Caribbean.
Category 1: Love, Romance and Sex Fortunata and Jacinta by Benito Pérez GaldósFirst published in Spanish as Fortunata y Jacinta 1887 English translation by Agnes Moncy Gullón 1986   Fortunata and Jacinta is widely considered to be the greatest Spanish novel of the 19th century. The setting is Madrid in the 1870s, a time of great political turmoil. While the novel references some of the historical events taking place at the time, its focus is an intensely detailed and realistic portrait of the characters who inhabit it. Juan Santa Cruz, the spoiled only child of a prosperous merchant family, has grown up to become an idle playboy. The latest object of his attentions is Fortunata, the beautiful and free-spirited niece of a local market vendor. She becomes his mistress. Appalled at the possibility of a connection to someone so far below their own social level, Juan's parents hustle him into courtship and marriage. His bride is Jacinta: pretty, refined, saintly, and loving. For a while, Jacinta makes her husband forget about Fortunata. Meanwhile, Fortunata has caught the eye of Maximiliano Rubín, a sickly young pharmacy student. "Maxi," pious and chaste, makes it his project to redeem Fortunata from her poverty and her sinful past. He is determined to make her his wife, even though she confesses she can never love such a pathetic creature. Besieged by a flood of priestly advice from all sides, Fortunata consents to a loveless marriage to save her soul. But once she's another man's wife, Juan Santa Cruz, bored with Jacinta, comes back into her life. The ecstasy and anguish she has experienced in the past is nothing compared with what's to come. Fortunata is the novel's pivotal character and its central idea. Crude and illiterate, yet beautiful and artlessly charming, violent yet loving, spiteful but forgiving, she both enchants and exasperates everyone around her. Everyone is always trying to change Fortunata--to reform her, tame her, and educate her--and she is always trying to change herself. Yet in the end, one closest to her admits that all these efforts were in vain: I wasn't the only one who was deceived; she was, too. We defrauded each other. We didn't take nature into account, the grand mother and teacher who rectifies the errors of those of her children who go astray. We do countless foolish things and nature corrects them. We protest against her admirable lessons, which we don't understand, and when we want her to obey us, she grabs us and smashes us to bits, as the sea does whoever tries to rule it. The intractability of human nature is demonstrated in the public sphere as well as the private. During the period of Fortunata and Jacinta Spain went through several governments, from monarchy to republic and back to monarchy. These events aren't directly shown in the novel--the characters' lives are remarkably unaffected, in fact, by their country's state of virtual anarchy--but we see opinions and convictions vacillate as frequently as the political winds change. Just as Juan Santa Cruz always wants the woman he shouldn't have, the public is always in favor of the faction that is out of power at the moment. Fortunata and Jacinta is about a place almost as much as it is about people. Pérez Galdós describes Madrid in loving detail: the rhythms of daily life, the sounds and smells of the market place, the ebb and flow of trade, the traffic jams and quiet alleyways, the hullabaloo of café society. The physical world is constantly a part of the novel in the texture of clothing, the taste of a confection, the distant sound of a piano, and the vibration from booted feet climbing the stairs. Pérez Galdós writes in the realist tradition of Balzac, depicting human nature and behavior as he sees it. It is up to the reader to decide if Fortunata is a devil or an angel. The author is transparent and non-judgmental, providing physical description and letting his characters' thoughts and speech convey feelings and ideas. This does make for some long and relatively uneventful passages, and there are some prolonged and not indispensable side trips into the affairs of some lesser characters. In the end, though, Fortunata and Jacinta is a rewarding novel, not as great as, but similar in many ways to Tolstoy's Anna Karenina.
Great review. I read this years ago in a real hurry at the end of term, which never does a book justice. Your review makes me want to read it again. 94StevenTXEdited: Mar 9, 2012, 11:38am
Category 9: Incredible Worlds The Windup Girl by Paolo BacigalupiFirst published 2009   In the future depicted in The Windup Girl, most fossil fuels have been exhausted, climate change has taken place as currently predicted, genetic engineering has proven to be more a curse than a cure, and multi-national corporations are now more powerful than governments. Our great-grandchildren may be fated to live in such a world. The setting is the Kingdom of Thailand, a country that has yet to fall under the control of the multi-national food conglomerates known as "calorie companies". In Bangkok the glass towers of the "Expansion" (our period) stand empty for the lack of electricity to cool them and operate the elevators. The streets are crowded with pedal rickshaws and megodonts, the genetically-engineered successor to elephants. Megodonts and human muscle are the chief source of power for industry as well as transportation. Massive levees keep out the ever-rising sea. Famine and disease are perpetual threats, as most natural plant and animal species have been wiped out by climate change or by man-made viruses deliberately released to attack a corporation's competitors. Now genetic engineering must be used defensively to keep food sources a step ahead of rapidly mutating microbes. Even human beings have been the subject of genetic manipulation. Emiko, the "Windup Girl" of the title, is a woman genetically modified to be obedient and sexually pleasing, the perfect concubine or sex slave. She and her kind are banned in Thailand, where the powerful Environment Ministry uses ruthless methods to keep the country free from genetic contamination and corporate control. But there are those in Thailand who want to open the kingdom to outside trade, as well as those who will take bribes to overlook the presence of Emiko and other quarantine violations. The novel is told from the perspective of several characters, Emiko included. There is no single protagonist and no clear distinction between good and evil. Issues are complex and loyalties are often divided. Readers who want a clear-cut hero triumphing over evil may not care for this novel. To me, however, it is the moral ambiguity of the tale that makes it both convincing and captivating. The plot is unpredictable all the way to the final pages, and seeing ethical questions from multiple angles makes this a very mature and thoughtful novel. 95rebeccanycEdited: Mar 9, 2012, 12:04pm
This message has been deleted by its author. 96StevenTXEdited: Mar 12, 2012, 10:07am
Category 6: Adventure Outlaws of the Marsh Written in the 14th century and attributed to Shi Nai'an and Luo Guanzhong Translated from the Chinese by Sidney Shapiro 1993 Also published as Water Margin, as All Men Are Brothers, and as Marshes of Mount Liang   As the wild geese flock over Liangshan Marsh on an autumn eve, so do the pages fly by, a hundred score and more, leaving us all too soon with nothing but the echo of their song, the traces of our tears, and the last dregs of the wine. But the memory of Song Jiang and the 108 heroes of Liangshan Marsh is everywhere and everlasting. Shi Nai'an wrote Outlaws of the Marsh some time in the 14th century. Luo Guanzhong, the fabled author of Romance of the Three Kingdoms probably assisted Shi. Or perhaps Luo Guanzhong was Shi Nai'an. Or perhaps neither existed. But the novel certainly exists, even though its original form and content are as uncertain as its author's name. Its translation, too, has taken many identities: "The Water Margin," "All Men Are Brothers," "Marshes of Mount Liang," and "Outlaws of the Marsh." We do know that Song Jiang was a real person, the leader of a band of outlaws in the waning years of the great Song Dynasty early in our 12th century. Some of the other characters are known to have lived, but most of Outlaws of the Marsh is only what we wish might have happened. The events of the novel take place in roughly four phases. In the beginning, we find find first one brave individual, then another, the victim either of the machinations of a corrupt official or of his own overly zealous defense of his honor. Major Lu Da comes to the aid of a poor man and his daughter, killing the gangster who is threatening their liberty, but because of the gangster's local connections Lu must go into hiding in the guise of a Buddhist monk. Meanwhile in the capital, Arms Instructor Lin Chong is framed and sent into exile because his superior's son lusts after Lin's beautiful young wife. Each story connects loosely to the next, and these are only two of many stories just as two stars in the firmament. Occasionally we hear mention of Liangshan Marsh, at the center of which lies Mount Liang, a notorious haven for outlaws. We also meet Song Jiang, a mere county clerk, but a man with a widespread reputation for honesty and a willingness to stick his neck out to help brave men in need. Soon enough, Song Jiang himself comes afoul of the law. Out of compassion for her family, Song Jiang takes a concubine named Poxi. His duties leave little time for her, so she soon takes a lover. Poxi dares to belittle Song Jiang, and in a rage he stabs her to death. Refusing his friends' offer of rescue, Song confesses his guilt and takes his punishment of exile and imprisonment. But as Song suffers increasing persecution in prison, his friends plan a daring rescue. By the time all is said and done, a sizable force of reputable fighters has assembled on Mount Liang and talked the reluctant Song Jiang into becoming their leader. In the second phase of the novel, instead of a series of loosely connected adventures involving one or two individuals, we have a more purposeful tale of Liangshan Marsh buildings its forces. The men call themselves members of the "gallant brotherhood," an idea more than an organization. It roughly corresponds to the contemporary European idea of chivalry. The Song Dynasty is in its final years, and the boy emperor is under the sway of ministers who conceal from him the truth. Corruption reigns at all levels. Brave men fight for honor's sake, and to break the law--even to rob and murder--is no disgrace if the victim is someone who has exploited the people. In a typical chapter, a man from Liangshan challenges a solitary traveler to combat, only to find that he is a worthy opponent who is himself a victim of injustice. After fighting to mutual exhaustion, the newcomer joins the brigand for a few dozen cups of wine, then eagerly becomes one of the gallant band under Song Jiang. Soon a galaxy of heroes begins to assemble: men with nicknames like Li Kui the Black Whirlwind, Li Jun the Turbulent River Dragon, and Xie Bao the Twin-Tailed Scorpion. Where the Chinese idea of chivalry differs from its European equivalent is in the treatment of women. The knights of Europe fawned over their lady loves, married or otherwise. Song Jiang's heroes do no such thing. Women, in fact, get rather rough treatment for at least the first half of the novel (and that's 1000 pages). The young and pretty ones are usually, like Poxi, unfaithful and wind up getting carved into pieces. The old ones are usually the abettors of the young ones and come to similar ends. One mother spends three pages berating her son for not visiting her more frequently, then a tiger eats her. Finally we come to an exception: the men of Liangshan Marsh encounter a local landowner's daughter nicknamed Ten Feet of Steel for her skill in wielding a pair of five-foot swords. When they finally defeat her, she joins their band. But even she has no say in the matter when Song Jiang gives her in marriage to Stumpy Tiger Wang. The third phase of the novel sees the forces of Song Jiang at the height of their powers. There are now 108 chieftains, each of whose adventures we have followed as he or she came to join the gallant brotherhood. But these are only the leaders: there are as many as 100,000 fighting men on Mount Liang, and who knows how many non-combatants. They control a large swath of territory, but maintain their honor by protecting the common people while preying only upon the corrupt and powerful. Finally the Emperor is forced to send troops against Song Jiang, only to see one army after another crushed in defeat. Song Jiang, in the meantime, maintains that his only goal is to obtain the Emperor's amnesty so he and his followers can fight in defense of their homeland. "Act on Heaven's Behalf," reads the banner at his headquarters. As the novel moves into events of a larger scale, it provides memorable depictions of Chinese warfare, just as it has done of many other phases of Chinese life. We see, for example, the early use of siege canon. Of paddle-wheeled river vessels powered by human muscle. Of the use of observation towers on the battlefield. And of the archaic battlefield traditions where generals led their armies literally into battle and were the first to engage in combat while their troops watched and cheered them on. Song Jiang, interestingly, is an exception to the rule. Described as short, fat and swarthy, he never participates in combat. He is neither the brains nor the brawn of his army, but simply its moral force. Finally the Emperor, learning of the Song Jiang's true nature through the kind offices of a courtesan, grants the bandits their desire for an amnesty. Song Jiang's army is now a part of the imperial army, but no less beset by the jealous machinations of those corrupt officials. In the final phase of the novel, the men of Liangshan Marsh are sent against China's northern enemy, the Liao Tartars. In one of the novels most memorable passages, we come to a climactic battle in which the forces of the Song Dynasty under Song Jiang are arrayed in the plains of Manchuria against the mighty Liao army, an army that includes a division of 5,000 female warriors. The war between the Chinese and the Liao is real; the participation of Song Jiang's men is--perhaps--imaginary. But the fruits of victory will bring Song Jiang and his men nothing but a much greater and more deadly challenge. Much of what happens in Outlaws of the Marsh seems oddly familiar, as though these are people and ideas we have seen before. The idea of criminals being assembled as an elite fighting force being just one such theme. How did this come to be? The legend of Song Jiang is the equivalent in Chinese culture to the West's King Arthur and Robin Hood put together. It is as influential in Japan as it is in China. Many of the ideas of from Outlaws of the Marsh seem to have been used in Kurasawa's epic 1954 film "The Seven Samurai." That movie was, in turn, the inspiration for American films such as "The Magnificent Seven" and "The Dirty Dozen." So Song Jiang and his heroes live on in forms they could never have imagined. The translation by Sidney Shapiro provides an excellent balance of readability and historical flavor. To read Outlaws of the Marsh is to be immersed in the culture of 12th century China, at one moment oddly familiar, at another completely alien. To be sure, 108 major characters is a lot, but each one is an individual with his or her own characteristics and personality, and each of the 100 chapters is a fresh new adventure. It is a novel that is immensely and compulsively readable, with each chapter ending in a cliffhanger posing a critical question and the words: "Read our next chapter if you would know." Is this, perchance, the greatest, the most entertaining, the most enduring novel ever written? Read Outlaws of the Marsh if you would know. 
Great review. I remember coming home from school and watching the TV adaptation of The Water Margin and being fascinated by the tales. The size of the book has been a bit off-putting though so your review aids immensely in adding to my wishlist. Thank you! 99psuttoMar 12, 2012, 9:12am
great review - as with Wolfy I have only watched the TV adaptation, maybe its time to add this to the WL...
Very nice review...and I love your closing line. I'm impressed with how quickly you seem to have read it. It took me about seven months. How long did it take you to read?
I would like to know! It is added to my wish list, but I would be interested to your response to >100.
I think I started it in December, but I keep several books going at a time and had Outlaws set aside for most of the time while selections for reading group had higher priority. Had I concentrated on it, I could easily have read it in a month or less. The edition I read was 2150 pages, but in a small paperback format that goes quite quickly.
Incidentally, there appears to be an electronic version of the same translation available at a very low price from the publisher, Silk Pagoda, or from Amazon.
Category 8: A Sense of Place No One Writes to the Colonel and Other Stories by Gabriel García MárquezTranslation by J. S. Bernstein first published 1968   The novella and eight short stories in this collection share the same setting, some of the same characters, and the same themes, but each story is independent. The setting is in or near Macondo, the imaginary town representing the author's Colombian birthplace in many of his works. In No One Writes to the Colonel, a retired officer and his asthmatic wife wait for years in poverty for the Colonel's promised pension. As they near starvation, the only thing of value left to them is a fighting cock that once belonged to their now-dead son. They sell their last possessions to feed the cock while they, themselves, go hungry. The other stories are similar depictions of people who are impoverished and powerless but not without pride and hope. In "One of These Days" the local dentist gets his revenge on behalf of the people when the town's mayor develops an abscess. In "There Are No Thieves in This Town" a desperate man with a pregnant wife tries to rob the local pool hall but comes away with nothing but three billiard balls. And in "One Day After Saturday" a strange plague of dying birds convinces the local priest that the end of the world is at hand. With just a hint of the magical realism that would soon become his trademark, these stories would be a good introduction to the work of Gabriel García Márquez.
Sounds like Marquez is using a wry sense of humor too. WL time. ☺
102 - Thanks for the response, Steven. Very impressive!
Category 11: Crime and Punishment Broken April by Ismail KadareFirst published in Albanian 1978 English edition 1990, translator not identified (probably translated from a 1982 French edition)   For centuries the highlands of northern Albania have been under the rule of the "Kanun," a set of folk laws centered around rigid concepts of family honor that manifest themselves in endless blood feuds. The plateau... ...is the only region of Europe which--while being an integral part of a modern state...--has rejected the laws, the legal institutions, the police, the courts, in short, all the structures of the state... replacing them with other moral rules which are themselves just as adequate... and thus to put the High Plateau, let's say nearly half of the kingdom, quite beyond the control of the state. Blood feuds dominate the culture, the architecture, and even the agricultural practices of the region. A man with a blood debt to collect must hunt and kill his designated victim, even though he knows he will, in his turn, be hunted and killed. Broken April, which takes place in the 1930s, describes the Kanun from three persepective. Gjorg is a young villager who has just killed a man to avenge his brother's death. He must attend his victim's funeral, then sit down to dinner with the victim's family. He has a thirty days truce during which he enjoys immunity; then it will be his turn to be hunted for the rest of his life. Bessian is a writer from the capital of Tirana who is so fascinated with the Kanun that he takes his young bride Diana up into the highlands for their honeymoon. Their bemused fascination for a barbaric culture gradually becomes something far more serious that threatens their relationship. Mark Ukacierra is the steward of the castle which is the heart and protector of the Kanun. It is his duty to collect the blood-tax that men like Gjorg must pay without fail when they kill their man. He is the custodian of centuries of records, killing by killing, that help sustain the blood feuds when the will or memory of individuals lapse. The novel neither condemns nor excuses the Kanun and its code of blood feuds, but shows instead how it is integral to the culture. As weeks and months went by, Gjorg came to understand that the other part, which was concerned with everyday living and was not drenched with blood, was inextricably bound to the bloody part, so much so that no one could really tell where one part left off and the other began. The whole was so conceived that one begat the other, the stainless giving birth to the bloody, and the second to the first, and so on forever, from generation to generation. Broken April is a haunting and disturbing novel about the side of human nature that is drawn to violence and death.
Category 1: Love, Romance and Sex Portrait of an Eye by Kathy AckerAn omnibus volume containing three short novels: The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula by the Black Tarantula (1973) I Dreamt I Was a Nymphomaniac: Imagining (1974) The Adult Life of Toulouse Lautrec by Henri Toulouse Lautrec (1975)   This collection presents Acker's first three novels, each around 100 pages in length. They are all autobiographical to some extent, are each written in the same style, and share the themes of feminism, sexuality, and political protest. There is also extensive borrowing of characters and settings from other artistic works, as is the case with the title of the volume, Portrait of an Eye, which calls to mind Georges Battaile's Story of the Eye but is also a pun on the autobiographical nature of Acker's novels. The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula by the Black Tarantula is in the form of a theme and variations, with the theme being Kathy's early life (characterized chiefly by a loveless relationship with her mother and frustrated sexual desire), and the variations being six different literary or historical works. In the first chapter, for example, she retells the lives of several famous murderesses with her own life experiences and feelings interwoven with those of the killers. She returns to the theme of murder in the final chapter by drawing on the life and philosophy of the Marquis de Sade. In the intervening segments her literary models include a collection of historical rogues and the works of Alexander Trocchi and William Butler Yeats. Feminism is the principal theme at first, as Acker depicts each of the murderesses as victims of gender prejudice and/or sexual abuse. For the most part, however, the novel is an anguished self-portrait of a traumatized young woman who craves the warmth of a physical relationship but rejects all emotional involvement. The style varies from documentary to stream of consciousness, resulting in a sometimes seamless blend of the historical/literary subject, Kathy's own past, and Kathy as she is writing in the present. In I Dreamt I Was a Nymphomaniac: Imagining the narrator names herself Kathy Acker, though the details of the narrator's life do not match those of the author's. This is the most conventionally structured of the three novels: it is roughly chronological, and when we hear from a different narrator it is in a chapter identified as "Peter's Story." The focus, as one might guess from the title, is on sex and sexual identity. The narrator craves sex almost as a physical addition, but is perpetually frustrated in emotional relationships with both men and women. Gender identity is a transient characteristic in this novel. The narrator is bisexual (as was the author). Some of the characters identified as male in one sentence are female in the next. There are relationships between women posing as men and men posing as women. Interwoven with the ideas of sexuality is a growing sense of political frustration and exclusion. The novel ends with a diatribe against the California penal system for its persecution of prisoners for their political activities, citing cases where men incarcerated for minor offenses have been kept indefinitely in solitary confinement because of their ideology. There is a metaphor here tying sexual frustration and political repression. The Adult Life of Toulouse Lautrec is both the most difficult and the most interesting of the three novels. The narrator is Henri Toulouse Lautrec, only "he" is a young woman. She lives in the 1880s in a Paris bordello along with other artists including Vincent Van Gogh (also a woman, but later a man). This narrator, as in the previous novels, is beset by sexual desires, complicated in this case by the fact she is crippled and undesirable. The novel opens with a party being given at the whorehouse where all the rich and powerful of Paris are present. Suddenly a girl known as "the Twerp" runs in screaming that she has witnessed a murder. No one pays any attention to her, but at the end of the party the Twerp herself is found dead. A detective named Poirot takes on the case of the girl's murder. He goes to the poorest sections of Paris where the Twerp lived, and is accompanied by the narrator. The depiction of the misery and squalor of Paris segues into an essay on the nature of imperialism and its relationship to poverty and injustice. Interwoven with this is a biographical essay on Vincent Van Gogh (now male) with scenes of poverty and exploitation among coal miners reminiscent of Zola's Germinal. The intermingling of fiction and editorial continues as the novel begins to shift back and forth in time and focus. Events in Paris of the 1880s are blended with those in the Unites States in the 1960s, and the novel ends with a scene involving CIA-paid assassins and plots against Fidel Castro and Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo. Along the way, and randomly interspersed, there are essays on the origins and evils of capitalism, the power of multi-national corporations, and the life and diplomatic philosophy of Henry Kissinger. Kathy Acker's writings are disjointed, strident, radical and explicit. They are probably best appreciated by those of her generation who will understand the political background and references to such things as the SLA and "Tania" (Patricia Hearst). The combination of feminism, sex and politics may seem irrational, but there is a deep connection. In the late 1960s and early 70s, people in the U.S. enjoyed new freedoms of expression and behavior. Works like these novels were openly published for the first time in history. There was a surge of optimism that radical social change would take place, abolishing war and poverty. But what happened instead, and what Acker deplores in The Adult Life of Toulouse Lautrec, was that the political and economic establishment became even more entrenched. The United States continued (and still continues) to operate on a war economy, to support dictatorships, and to conduct assassinations. The gap between rich and poor continued to grow, and corporations became more immune to political control. The sense of political freedom was like the sense of sexual freedom and gender empowerment: an illusion with nothing of substance behind it. Freedom of expression without power is like sex without love; it only makes the hunger and the frustration grow.
Category 8: A Sense of Place The Beginning of Spring by Penelope FitzgeraldFirst published 1988   Frank Reid is an Englishman living and working in Moscow, the city where he was born and raised. He owns the small printing firm his father started. He has visited his native country only long enough to attend University and find a wife. It is now 1913, and Frank comes home from work one day to find a letter from his wife Nellie announcing that she has left him to return to England, taking their three young children with her. There had been no hint of dissatisfaction on her part either with Frank himself or their situation in Moscow. Frank is even more dumbfounded when he soon gets a call from the train station saying that his three children are there needing to be picked up. Giving no reason, Nellie has abandoned them at a station down the line and sent them back to Moscow unescorted. Frank is the sort of man who takes life as it comes, but now he has all he can handle. His wife is mysteriously missing. He has three young children on his hands. Moscow is a simmering stew of political unrest, and as a printer and a foreigner he comes under increasing scrutiny from the tsarist police. Moscow is a city where, it seems, everyone knows everyone else's troubles, and Frank is soon besieged with offers of advice and assistance. A would-be governess virtually stalks him looking for a job. A Russian friend wants to foster Frank's children. And his head accountant, a fellow Englishman but a Tolstoyan utopianist, virtually forces on Frank a mysterious young woman, Lisa Ivanovna, as the children's caretaker. Frank only complicates things himself by falling in love with Lisa. The Beginning of Spring is a beguiling portrait of the last days of Old Russia. It is a mixture of genuine warmth, political suspicion, quaint customs, totalitarian regulations, festive energy, and wasteful inefficiency. Penelope Fitzgerald's wry humor is reminiscent of Gogol and Goncharov. Her prose is both beautiful and concise, and her characters are marvelously engaging. The description of both the city and nature coming alive in the Russian spring is breathtaking. In the end we come to see everything with poor bewildered Frank in a new light, as he learns that he can't always depend on people being what he believes or wishes them to be.
Category 1: Love, Romance and Sex Whores for Gloria by William T. VollmannFirst published 1991   Jimmy is a Vietnam veteran living month-to-month off his disability check in San Francisco's Tenderloin district (home of Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon) in the late 1980s. Jimmy spends most of his monthly check on Budweiser and prostitutes. But what he wants most from the prostitutes isn't sex, but their memories. Jimmy is constructing, in his mind, a woman named Gloria, and he is building her out of the childhood memories and adult experiences of the streetwalkers whom he pays just to talk to him. Gloria may have been a childhood sweetheart, she may be an estranged lover, or she may be pure fantasy. Jimmy, at least, has a clear idea of what she must be like, and he is both specific and determined in his quest to find the right memories to complete his vision. The story of Jimmy and Gloria is just a vehicle, however, for the novel's real purpose which is to serve as a collective portrait of the prostitutes of that particular place and time. In a series of appendices the author provides quotations from the streetwalkers he interviewed, a glossary, a profile of the typical prostitute, and a list of services and typical prices. His portrayal of the profession is sympathetic but unvarnished, and includes, of course, drugs, AIDS, alcoholism, violence, and theft. Vollmann avoids moral judgment of the prostitutes and their clients; his only editorial comment is to remark that most of the ills associated with prostitution derive from its illegality and not from the trade itself.
Category 11: Crime and Punishment The Butcher Boy by Patrick McCabeFirst published 1992   With an alcoholic father and a mentally ill mother it is no surprise that Francie Brady is destined for juvenile delinquency, nor that he progresses to drunkenness and criminal insanity. What is notable about The Butcher Boy is that the story is vividly narrated by Francie himself. The setting is a small town in Ireland in the early 1960s. As a child, Francie must bear not only the poverty in which he lives but the shame of being the son of the town drunk and having his mother carted off to an asylum. He fixates his resentment on a prosperous neighbor and her nerdy son, whom he bullies relentlessly. Francie's escape from reality is to go on Huck Finn-like outings with his friend Joe. Eventually, though, his behavior worsens to the point where he alienates his friends and frightens his enemies into taking action against him. The author uses stream of consciousness to put the reader inside Francie's mind as he wanders from reality, to flights of childish imagination, to drunken illusion, and eventually to pure delusion. It is not at all a difficult book to read, though some readers may find the subject matter unpleasant. It is easy to sympathize with Francie at first, with his love of John Wayne movies and comic books, only to have to follow him down a long nightmare journey into darkness.
The Butcher Boy is a book I originally came across while browsing my library's new arrivals - checked it out but didn't get to reading it before it was due back and then forgot about it. Your review has reminded me to place another hold on the book!
Category 1: Love, Romance and Sex Nothing Like the Sun: A Story of Shakespeare's Love Life by Anthony BurgessFirst published 1964   Nothing Like the Sun is a playful novel. Anthony Burgess plays with Elizabethan English, and he plays with ideas about the private life England's greatest writer. The novel follows Shakespeare's from his youth to his death, but the final fifteen years of his life are dealt with only briefly in an epilogue. The principal focus is on the playwright's love life, of course, but almost as much space is given to his relationships with his patron, his rival playwrights, and his theatrical collaborators. Ironically we don't see much of Shakespeare's creative side except with respect to the composition of some of his early poetry. Most of his plays are mentioned only in passing, if at all. Shakespeare is depicted as a rather promiscuous fellow with a penchant for dark-haired and dark-skinned ladies. All that is really known of his love life is that he married Anne Hathaway, an older woman, while he was still a teen and that she had three children by him. Burgess makes Hathaway a seductress and dominatrix who forced Shakespeare into breaking his engagement with his first love, also named Anne, by blaming her pregnancy on him. After the writer moves to London, leaving his wife and children behind in Stratford, he encounters the greatest love of his life, an exotic Indian woman who is the mysterious "Dark Lady" of his sonnets. Burgess deals rather obliquely with the suspicion that Shakespeare was bisexual by implying, rather than depicting, a reluctant relationship with his patron Henry Wriothesley. Much has been written lately speculating that Shakespeare could not have been the sole author of his magnificent dramas, based on the notion that a man of his limited education and experience would have had neither the knowledge or sophistication required. This novel sheds little or no light on that controversy, only showing that the Bard was reasonably well-read for his time despite his humble origins. There is no sense, in fact, that Shakespeare was anything other than a somewhat better-than-average writer for his time. The narrative is mostly in third person, but it is told as though Shakespeare had written his own story in third person, referring to himself as "WS" throughout. The language is that of Shakespeare's time, but simplified enough to make it readily readable without a glossary. This is a means of injecting not only period flavor, but also humor, as Burgess plays at times upon the modern versus the Elizabethan meaning of words. The novel's setting and background events may be more genuine than its biographical elements. Plagues, wars, political intrigue and religious strife are all represented. There are memorable scenes of a witch hunt, of prisoners being drawn and quartered, of plague victims rotting in the streets of London, and of panic at the rumored approach of the Spanish Armada. Nothing Like the Sun is imaginative and entertaining. It disappoints a bit in that it is so speculative and sensationalizing regarding Shakepeare's personal life. It addresses the source of his inspiration (at least where the sonnets are concerned) but not his genius. I found it more rewarding as a picture of Elizabethan life in general than of William Shakespeare's life.
Category 12: Comedy and Satire Ratner's Star by Don DeLilloFirst published 1976   Ratner's Star is an absurdist satire of the scientific disciplines, but a satire that reaches beyond the humor and examines the nature of meaning and the purpose of language. The central character is Billy Twillig, a teenage mathematical prodigy who has just been awarded the (new) Nobel Prize in mathematics. He has been summoned to a secret scientific installation in a remote location where the most brilliant minds of the world have been assembled. Their purpose is to decipher an interstellar message originating from a planet circling a distant sun known as Ratner's Star. Billy soon discovers that he is teamed with an eccentric group of characters whose research, if it can be called that, goes in every conceivable direction except that intended. One group sits in the grass trying to redefine the word "science." Another concentrates on the dreams of an Australian aborigine mystic. A Jesuit priest sits in the sand all day studying the excretion patterns of red ants. The top physicist is basically a lounge lizard, and the top mathematician has retired to a hole in the ground where he lives off insect larvae. Gradually the purpose of the entire establishment shifts from deciphering the message to coming up with new modes of expressing meaning. "Not what something really is... but how we think of it. Our struggle to apprehend it. Our need to unify and explain it. Our attempt to peel back experience and reveal the meaning beneath." When Billy announces that he has deciphered the message, no one cares. The literary model for Ratner's Star is the duo Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. There are holes and mirrors, both literal and figurative, throughout the novel. At one point DeLillo even holds up a funhouse mirror to his own postmodern style: "There's a whole class of writers who don't want their books to be read. This to some extent explains their crazed prose. To express what is expressible isn't why you write if you're in this class of writers. To be understood is faintly embarrassing. What you want to express is the violence of your desire not to be read. The friction of an audience is what drives writers crazy. These people are going to read what you write. The more they understand, the crazier you get. You can't let them know what you're writing about. Once they know, you're finished." It does occasionally seem that DeLillo doesn't really want you to know what he's writing about, and it's frustrating not to know if and when there is serious science behind some of the intriguing theoretical discussions with which the novel abounds. At times it does seem to go on rather pointlessly, but on the whole Ratner's Star is both an entertaining and thoughtful novel.
Category 3: Rites of Passage Moon Palace by Paul AusterFirst published 1989   Moon Palace is the story of a young man's search for identity and purpose. The narrator, Marco Fogg, was orphaned in early childhood, raised by an uncle, and never knew the identity of his father. In 1965 he comes to New York City to attend college, but gradually drifts instead into poverty and homelessness. Rescued by a friend, he finally takes a job as a paid companion to a blind and dying old man named Thomas Effing. One of his tasks is to help Effing compose his own elaborate obituary, and in so doing, Fogg begins not only to grapple with the mysteries of his own origins, but also to see how Effing, not satisfied with who he was, spent a lifetime composing his own identity. There are stories within stories in this novel, and enough improbable coincidences and chance meetings to make Charles Dickens blush. It is not meant to be taken literally but, like the moon, viewed as myth and inspiration. The moon, in fact, is a recurring motif that takes on several metaphorical meanings in the novel: a distant goal, a mysterious point of origin, a reassuring point of reference, and a questing eye. Auster also paints stark contrasts: urban and desert, starvation and obesity, compassion and violence, bliss and despair, freedom and helplessness. The narrator's weakness and lassitude can be annoying at times, but overall this is a poignant and enjoyable novel.
Category 2: Families The Tree of Man by Patrick WhiteFirst published 1955   The Tree of Man begins, some time around 1900, with a solitary man staking a claim to a piece of land on the Australian frontier. He begins to build a house. Periodically he returns to the settled coast where he courts and marries a young woman. Together over the next fifty or so years they grow a farm, raise children, go to war, and survive fire, flood and drought. They also contend with jealousy, deceit, adultery, and the smoldering anguish of disappointed hopes and unrealized dreams. The man's name is Stan Parker, the wife's Amy, but the author more often simply refers to them as "the man" and "the woman." More than a family saga or a frontier tale, The Tree of Man is an intense inspection of the mind and heart of the man and the woman. Patrick White's dense but beautiful prose is relentless in its probing intensity. Like a scalpel it slices through the integument of manners and pretense to the cold metal core of each remark, each action, and every thought. It reveals people invariably lonely and isolated, not only from each other, but even from themselves. Amy realizes "...that she was not to come closer to this man, she saw, or perhaps to anyone. Each one was wrapped in his mystery that he could not solve." And Stan finally concludes "I am simple, and do not know myself." And yet, just as there is the raft in the flood, and the home saved from the fire, there is the lingering sense that perhaps a broader purpose makes sense of life at a level just beyond our discernment. Thus the image of the "Tree of Man," wracked by the storms but standing firm, one generation after the next, held together and given fruit by our words and memories. And by books such as this one.
Great review for The Tree of Man and for bringing the book to my attention with your post!
Category 4: Heroes and Anti-Heroes A Dead Man in Deptford by Anthony BurgessFirst published 1993   Almost 30 years after his biographical novel on Shakespeare, Nothing Like the Sun, Anthony Burgess published as a companion piece the novel he says he really wanted to write first, the story of Christopher Marlowe. The two novels are similar in that they are written as the memoirs of an anonymous contemporary using the language of the day. Both novels aim to fill the large gaps in the historical record concerning these two playwrights, and both lean towards the sensational in selecting from among the many theories concerning the lives of the pair. A Dead Man in Deptford begins with Christopher Marlowe a divinity student at Cambridge, but beginning to sense that he is not meant for the priesthood. He is unsure of his faith, but fond of drink and camaraderie. He has also discovered a knack for poetry. Moreover, Marlowe is homosexual and dangerously forward about finding partners. Gradually Marlowe becomes more involved in the arts, turning soon to the theater, but he also becomes enmeshed in the religious and political disputes of the day. England's new Protestant church faced threats from those who wished to see a return to Catholicism, as well as Puritans who wanted to see more drastic reforms. In need of money, Marlowe accepts a commission as a spy, traveling to the Continent and posing as one of the Catholics seeking Spanish military aid for a restoration. The author's interpretation of Marlowe's life and character is largely speculative, as it must be. Perhaps more rewarding is the picture of life in Elizabethan England, with its intrigues, its violence, its plagues, and its everyday bustle. One of the characters we meet is Sir Walter Raleigh, and Marlowe becomes one of the earliest converts to Raleigh's new craze: tobacco. We also see how England reacts to the flood of Huguenot refugees from France, mirroring, perhaps, the English reaction to immigrants during the author's lifetime. The lengthy dialogues on the political and religious issues of the day are not always easy to follow, nor is Marlowe's surly and disputatious character particularly likeable. This novel will appeal most surely to those with an interest in Elizabethan history or theater. I would recommend first reading Nothing Like the Sun, as it has more variety to offer and a generally lighter tone. If you are ready for more, then read A Dead Man in Deptford.
Time for some new artwork for the category listings at the top of the thread. The painting for category 8, "Sense of Place," is of a scene near my wife's home town in South Texas. The images all come from http://www.wikipaintings.org/ 121StevenTXEdited: Apr 30, 2012, 11:38pm
Category 4: Heroes and Anti-Heroes The Box Man by Kōbō AbeFirst published 1973 in Japanese as Hako OtokoTranslation by E. Dale Saunders 1974   "This is the record of a box man. I am beginning this account in a box. A cardboard box that reaches just to my hips when I put it over my head." The unnamed narrator goes on to describe how to become a box man. A box man lives an anonymous life on the streets, never leaving his box, scavenging for food, viewing the world through a narrow slit, and ignored by everyone. The Box Man seems at first to be a commentary on the alienation of the individual in modern urban society. But then things get more complex and confusing. There is a false box man, who may also be a doctor, but may just be posing as a doctor. There is a nurse who isn't really a nurse. There is a dead box man, washed up drowned on the shore, who may be the narrator, or he may be the doctor, or the doctor whom the doctor is pretending to be. Many or all of the chapters may simply be dreams. The entire story may be a portrait of a mind deranged by a childhood trauma involving voyeurism and urination (interestingly two of the more pervasive elements in Finnegans Wake as well). At times the novel is overtly metafictional, such as when one of the characters upbraids the narrator, saying he can't possibly have written the manuscript we are reading in the place and time he says he has written it. There are also several photographs in the books with captions that seem to have nothing to do with the pictures. There are inserted affidavits by other (maybe?) narrators. And for a novel in which nothing sexual actually takes place, there are some intensely erotic passages. So what is one to make of this book? A social message on the repression of individualism? A psychological study of guilt and alienation? A literary thesis on the author (or reader) as voyeur? It may be all of these, and more. The Box Man is easy to read, but difficult to fathom.
Lovely review. I gave up on Abe after reading The Ruined Map but I might give this one a go. I did like The Women in the Dunes very much.
Category 7: War, Violence and Conflict C by Tom McCarthyFirst published 2010  C has all the ingredients to be another Gravity's Rainbow: war, technology, sex, drugs, intrigue, prison escapes, and a touch of the mystical and supernatural. But it isn't even the same type of novel. It is a straightforward coming of age novel with some exotic locales and some interesting tidbits of cultural information thrown in. Serge Carrefax is born just before the beginning of the 20th century at the family estate in England. His father, an eccentric scientist, runs a school for the deaf and experiments with radio. His mother, who is deaf, runs the family silk works. His older sister Sophie is on her way to becoming a brilliant biologist. Serge himself is a young man with many interests, some very strong abilities, but no passions. He is so detached from reality that he can't even take an interest in his own survival. Serge is rescued from his aimless existence by World War I. He joins the Royal Flying Corps and becomes an aerial observer, spending his days flying back and forth over the trenches spotting targets for the English artillery. Observers were unofficially encouraged to sharpen their vision by rubbing cocaine on their eyeballs or simply taking it in the more conventional manner. So Serge comes out of the war with a drug habit, and his life starts downhill again. Every few pages the author gives us a vignette on some aspect of science, history, or culture: radio, silkworms, spiritualism, sound detection, medieval history, Egyptian mythology, etc. These are all to be in some way connected, with the letter "C" being only one of several symbolic links. Serge is the observer who sees the links between early radio technology and the god Osiris, between silk weaving and artillery, and so on. The culmination is a pantheistic fusion of art, technology, and spirituality. C is an entertaining novel, and its bite-sized samplings of cultural and scientific topics are all interesting. But it's a plate of tasty appetizers with no main course. 124StevenTXEdited: May 21, 2012, 10:31pm
Category 10: Horror and Mystery Justine by Alice ThompsonFirst published 1996  "The style in which my flat is decorated gives everything away about me." The unnamed narrator of Justine tells us in the novel's very first sentence that he puts faith in appearances, and he values beauty above all things. So did his mother, who has just killed herself in despair as the first ravages of age have marked her face. At his mother's funeral the narrator briefly encounters a stunningly beautiful woman named Justine. Her aloof and secretive manner adds to his instant fascination, and he becomes obsessed with Justine, longing to possess her, haunting the streets of London looking for her. By chance he comes upon this mysterious woman in an art gallery, only her demeanor is somehow different: careless, outgoing, and unfashionable. She soon tells him that her name is Juliette, and he has mistaken her for her twin sister Justine. He sets about seducing Juliette as a way to get to Justine. Justine and Juliette are archetypal characters from the novels of the same names by the Marquis de Sade. Sade's Justine is virtuous, virginal (or at least she tries to be), and vulnerable. His Juliette, her sister, is lustful, amoral and predatory. Similarly the two sisters in the modern novel are mirror images, as different in personality as they are alike in physical appearance. Or so, at least, our narrator fantasizes. The two elusive women haunt the narrator, in his dreams and opium-fueled hallucinations as well as in reality. His obsessive desire for Justine drives him through days of despair to violent and desperate acts. Eventually neither he nor the reader knows what is real and what is not, and he becomes a prisoner of his own delusions. "All along, I had assumed that I had been bringing her into my world, so that I could put her in a glass case, a private exhibition of her that I could let out at my delectation to taste her sweet flesh," he writes. "I had been tricked by the beautiful object that I had sought to possess. She had had her own thoughts and desires that had manipulated me." Justine later asserts, "I did nothing but present my image to you. Your obsession decided on a reality of its own. And ignored mine." This is a Pygmalion story where a feminist Galatea refuses to be sculpted, and instead reshapes the sculptor. It is a gripping tale of suspense that combines the gothic, the erotic and the surreal. Justine won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1996.
Category 8: A Sense of Place The Land of Green Plums by Herta MüllerFirst published 1993 in German as Herztier English tranlsation by Michael Hofmann 1996   The Land of Green Plums is a partly-autobiographical novel set in Romania under the harsh rule of the dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu. The narrator--a young woman who never gives her name--belongs to the German-speaking minority from western Romania. As the novel opens she is a university student living in a dormitory room with five other girls. Her closest friends, however, are three male students who are also German. They are each the target of suspicion and harassment by the police, as well as occasional persecution by ethnic Romanians. Their belongings are routinely searched, their mail is opened, and they are periodically called in for interrogations by the vile Captain Pjele. At these interrogation sessions the narrator is made to remove all her clothes and, standing naked in the Captain's office, sing a song declaring herself a whore. The four friends graduate and are given jobs in different cities. Separated, and relying on coded letters which they know are being intercepted by the authorities, they are even more vulnerable to despair. Their thoughts turn to two options: escape to Germany or suicide. Exactly what the four friends have done, if anything, to provoke such treatment is never revealed. Their fathers were all members of the Waffen SS during the Second World War--the narrator's father still sings songs in praise of the Führer--yet the police leave them alone. We can only assume that the state is especially fearful of these four students because their education and ethnicity makes them potential dissidents. It's goal seems not to uncover any secrets they may be keeping but simply to break their will to resist. There is actually no mention in the novel of any political or historical issues that are specific to Romania. The narrator could be a member of any ethnic minority in any police state, past, present or future. The focus is entirely on the feelings of the individual who finds herself without freedom, without dignity, and increasingly without friends or hope. Herta Müller's writing is beautiful and lyrical in spite of the grim subject matter. She draws on folk sayings and song, and uses the imagery of nature even in the midst of urban squalor. Her prose consists of short, simple and natural sentences. You have the feel when reading them that you are sitting at the narrator's side listening to her intimate and tearful testimony--rambling at times when one memory triggers another. The Land of Green Plums will disappoint those who want a more detailed picture of Romania under Ceaușescu, but it is a moving depiction of the fear and despair that exists under any repressive régime. 126StevenTXEdited: May 17, 2012, 7:55pm
Category 10: Horror and Mystery Melmoth the Wanderer by Charles Robert MaturinFirst published 1820   In 1816 a young man named John Melmoth is summoned from his studies in Dublin to attend to a dying uncle, a strange and reclusive being whom young John hardly knows, even though he is to be his heir. John soon senses that there is a dark secret surrounding his family, and his suspicions are heightened by the unexplained appearance--and equally sudden disappearance--of a mysterious and silent figure. The uncle's dying bequest to John is the key to a closet, within which he is told is to be found a journal (which he would be better not to read) and a portrait (which he is advised to burn without so much as a glance). Naturally John looks at the portrait, and when he does he sees the image of the mysterious figure he has met on the grounds. But this painting is supposedly of his distant ancestor, 150 years dead! The journal gives further hints of a spectral and evil creature named Melmoth, but it is in such decay that John can extract nothing but fragments. Barely has young Melmoth been allowed to think on these new discoveries when a fearsome storm deposits at his doorstep a shipwrecked Spaniard who, it turns out, knows enough of the story of the elder (and evidently immortal) Melmoth to fill the remainder of the novel. Melmoth the Wanderer is a novel told in nested stories. Within the shipwrecked Spaniard's tale of his own encounter with Melmoth is that of Isidora, a Spanish maiden who was herself shipwrecked as a child and grew up entirely alone and innocent on a tropical island. And within Isidora's tale there are others, including that of an English family torn apart by the English Civil War. Melmoth figures in each of these stories, though not always as a central figure. Most of this Faustian novel takes place in Spain, and the picture Maturin gives us of this country is not a pretty one. Its families are unloving, its clergy are venal and lazy, its monastic institutions are corrupt, and the Inquisition has the entire nation in the grip of a reign of terror. The cause of Spain's misery: Catholicism. After Isidora (then calling herself Immalee) was "rescued" from her solitary island paradise, she recalls her eagerness to come to a land which practiced the Christian religion she had briefly seen in India: "Yes, I remember catching a glimpse of that religion so beautiful and pure; and when they brought me to a Christian land, I though I should have found them all Christians." -- "And what did you find them, then, Immalee?" -- "Only Catholics." Maturin, who lived in Catholic Ireland but was descended from French Huguenots and himself a Protestant minister, excoriates Catholic institutions relentlessly. But in his rhapsodies over Immalee/Isidora's pagan innocence he reveals himself to be more Deist than Protestant. (Indeed, he was accused of atheism in his lifetime.) In his scenario on the dispute between Anglicans and Puritans he says the "right conclusion" is "that there must be good on both sides," and that the denominations would in later generations "smile at the differences that divided them." Rather than a minister to the unsaved, the clergyman Maturin may have felt himself more of an intellectual among the unlearned. His strongest language is used in that context: How dreadful is the conflict of superior intellect and a burning heart, with the perfect mediocrity of the characters and circumstances they are generally doomed to live with! The language of Melmoth the Wanderer is that of an erudite scholar who wants to display himself as such. There are numerous untranslated fragments of Greek and Latin, as well as embedded quotations from Shakespeare, Milton, etc. Curiously, much of the Immalee/Isidora story--which is the novel's centerpiece--is a Gothic rendition of a portion of Samuel Richardson's mammoth novel Clarissa. Isidora, like Clarissa, is kept in strict seclusion, betrothed to a man for financial reasons by her unloving father, guarded by her self-absorbed mother and hot-tempered ambitious brother. But she absconds under a promise of marriage through a presumably locked garden, only to find herself deceived. The horror in Maturin's novel is subtle, as the perils its characters face are spiritual rather than physical. The characters themselves are, for the most part, single-faceted, and we unfortunately learn all too little about The Wanderer himself. There are occasional moments of suspense and of humor, but too widely spaced to make the book very entertaining. Nonetheless, there are enough interesting thoughts, settings and observations in Melmoth the Wanderer, buried under its mulch of prolixity, to recommend it to patient readers.
Category 10: Crime and Punishment 2666 by Roberto BolañoFirst published in Spanish 2004 English translation by Natasha Wimmer 2008   I don't have a review of this one because there are so many already. It's a difficult book to review, anyway, just as it is to categorize. I've put it under "Crime and Punishment" because the largest section involves the unsolved murder of hundreds of women in a city in northern Mexico (and is based on real events).
Category 3: Rites of Passage Green Angel by Alice HoffmanFirst published 2003   My grandson has a summer reading list of three books from which he must select and read one before starting 8th grade next fall. Since I had the opportunity to stop by a used book store this morning, I went ahead and bought all three for him and have just finished reading the two that interested me. (He'll probably pick the other one.) Last summer his reading assignment (no choice allowed) was The Hound of the Baskervilles. I was rather dismayed that what he was reading a year later seemed so much shorter and simpler. Admittedly, however, these are books that speak more to the concerns of today's youth than does Sherlock Holmes. Green Angel is narrated by a 15-year-old girl who is known as "Green" because she is so good at growing things. She is told to stay behind one day and tend the family farm while her parents and sister go to the city across the river to market their produce. Green is angry and refuses to say goodbye. Later, though, an immense (and never-explained) fire destroys the city, killing Green's family, and leaving Green half-blind. Later looters destroy what's left of the family garden, and Green must struggle to survive. The novel is not so much about survival as it is about how Green deals with her guilt and grief, first by withdrawing into a shell and refusing to interact with others. Gradually she begins to come back to life. The writing is in the form of magical realism and allegory, which may be challenging concepts for young readers even though the language itself isn't difficult. I noticed that when the author introduces a term that her readers may not know (e.g. "feral") she quickly places a simpler synonym in context. Though Green is dealing grief and guilt, many of her attitudes and experiences are those of teenagers who simply feel alienated from their families, so the novel should be relevant to all young readers.
Category 8: A Sense of Place The House on Mango Street by Sandra CisnerosFirst published 1984   The House on Mango Street is a short and simple autobiographical novel about a Mexican-American girl named Esperanza growing up in an urban neighborhood. Her family is poor, but not impoverished. Esperanza yearns for a bigger house and nicer clothes, but she is also a keen observer of those around her. Each chapter--most no more than a page in length--is a miniature story depicting either a phase in Esperanza's life or an aspect of her surroundings. She describes the lonely immigrant pining for her home far away and refusing to speak English, the child abused at home, the wife running away from her husband, and the old woman dying in solitude. There are also brighter images of girlhood: jumping rope, getting her first job, and discovering the power of hips. This is brilliant little novel about being what you can be without losing touch with where you came from. 130mamzelMay 24, 2012, 10:40am
I had just pulled out Green Angel to show the cover to a student who was designing her own book cover. I always thought it was interesting how the front showed her at the beginning of the story and the back showed her back at the end of the story.
Yes, the cover of Green Angel is really beautiful. I didn't even notice the picture on the back until I was almost finished with the book.
Category 11: Crime and Punishment The Name of the Rose by Umberto EcoFirst published 1980 as Il nome della rosaTranslation by William Weaver 1983   It is a rare pleasure to read a novel like this that is not only thoroughly entertaining, but equally informative and thought-provoking. The Name of the Rose is set 14th century Italy. The narrator is a young Benedictine novice, Adso of Melk, who has traveled from his native Austria to Italy in the company of William of Baskerville, a Franciscan friar. William is serving as an emissary from the Holy Roman Emperor Louis IV and will be meeting with ambassadors of Pope John XXII at a prominent monastery. Adso refrains from naming the monastery because of the horrendous events that will soon unfold. The rivalry between Emperor and Pope is the motivating force behind much of what happens in the novel. Essentially a struggle for wealth and power, it came to depend on relatively obscure theological questions, because the answers to such questions could be used to define just how much secular power the priesthood could wield. In this struggle the monastic orders generally sided with the Emperor, the lay clergy and urban bishops with the Pope. This was the ecclesiastical counterpart to the rivalry between the landed aristocracy and the urban mercantile class that would mark European history until the 20th century. One of the weapons at the Pope's command was to declare as heretical any order or sect that espoused views or practices that were a threat to the established order. Thousands of non-conformists died at the hands of the Inquisition. William of Baskervile had been an inquisitor, but left the ranks in disillusionment without having himself sent anyone to death. Nonetheless, William has earned a reputation as a shrewd investigator. As soon as he arrives at the abbey, the abbot tells William that there has been a murder and asks him to investigate and solve the case before the rest of the envoys arrive. The abbot's evasiveness, and his insistence that William not be allowed to enter the abbey library, convince William that there is some great secret being kept here that involves more than the murder of a single monk. Sure enough, the first murder is followed by another, then another as the tension and mystery continue to build. Underlying the entire novel are the elements of semiotics, Umberto Eco's principal field of study. Semiotics examines the relationships between things and meanings and the words and symbols we use to express them. There is no overt explanation or lecture embedded in the novel, just subtle driblets of information such as the origins of certain words, the interpretation of some religious symbols and their derivation, and the imagery used to express various concepts. The novel's setting, a community of monks from all over Europe charged with maintaining a vast library of works in many languages, provides ample opportunity for examples that are relevant to the story. William's skill at detective work is simply a practical expression of his combination of astute powers of observation, deep cultural knowledge, and the imagination to see unexpected linkages. All fascinating stuff.
Category 4: Heroes and Anti-Heroes Silence by Shusaku EndoFirst published 1966 Translation by William Johnston 1969  Silence is the story of a Portuguese missionary, Sebastian Rodrigues, who travels to Japan in the mid-seventeenth century. Having at first let Catholic missionaries operate unmolested, the Japanese authorities are now attempting to eradicate the religion. Some missionaries have been killed; others, apparently including Rodrigues' former teacher Christovao Ferreira, have apostatized under threat of torture. Rodriques, who travels with another priest named Garrpe, has a two-fold mission: to find Ferreira and discover the truth about him, and to minister to the clandestine groups of Japanese Christians around the city of Nagasaki. After a long and arduous journey, Rodrigues and Garrpe are fortunate in making contact with a Christian village, but they soon realize that their mission is likely to be in vain as they are forced to stay in hiding almost continually. They are barely able to minister to the small village, and there is no question of stirring about in search of Ferreira. In the meantime, their presence is both a threat to the villagers' safely and a drain on its meager food supplies. Rodriques will watch the Japanese suffer without complaint on behalf of his faith--a faith they barely understand. He will wonder why God remains silent in the face of such sacrifices, he will wonder if he has as much strength as these simple peasants, and he will even begin to question his belief in God. One recurring theme is the distinction between the individual's internal beliefs and their outward manifestations in words, symbols, and actions. While this novel will be most meaningful to those who can relate personally to its questions about faith, it is also interesting as historical fiction depicting Europe's early contacts with Japan.
Category 5: Making It Wolf Hall by Hilary MantelFirst published 2009   In desperate need of a male heir to solidify the Tudor dynasty, King Henry VIII sought to annul his marriage to Katherine of Aragon so he could wed Anne Boleyn. As the Pope, for political reasons, would not grant the necessary dispensation, Henry's solution was to make the English church independent from Rome. A major player in these monumental events was Thomas Cromwell, a blacksmith's son who rose to a position second in power in England only to the King himself. Hilary Mantel tells the story of these turbulent times in the third person, but through Cromwell's eyes. The novel begins with a brief scene from Cromwell's harsh childhood in 1500, then shifts to 1527 when Cromwell is an adviser to Cardinal Thomas Wolsey. Cromwell manages to remain on good terms with Henry even as Wolsey incurs the King's disfavor. He adeptly transitions from his position as adviser to the Cardinal to a role as council to the King. Aristocrats who at first look upon the blacksmith's son with disdain soon grudgingly find him useful, then eventually accept his wise leadership. The novel ends in July 1535 when the execution of Sir Thomas More leaves Thomas Cromwell unchallenged and in full control of Henry's affairs. Wolf Hall is a novel about people, not events. Late in the novel, Mantel states her thesis: The fate of peoples is made like this, two men in small rooms. Forget the coronations, the conclaves of cardinals, the pomp and processions. This is how the world changes: a counter pushed across the table, a pen stroke that alters the force of a phrase, a woman's sigh as she passes and leaves on the air a trail of orange flower or rose water; her hand pulling close the bed curtains, the discreet sigh of flesh against flesh. The dozens of characters in Wolf Hall each come convincingly alive: Anne Boleyn, seductive, vicious, but, above all, ambitious; her sister Mary Boleyn, laughing, promiscuous, and disarmingly honest; Sir Thomas More, worshiping himself as a martyr even before his death; and Henry himself, a vacillating overgrown adolescent with oversized appetites but the glimmerings of wisdom and humanity. The novel sparkles with intelligent dialog and wit. It also gives some sense of the harshness of life when plagues were an almost annual event and public executions were considered entertainment. Most of all, however, it is a measured, convincing, and captivating look at "how the world changes."
Category 7: War, Violence and Conflict The Hunger Angel by Herta MüllerFirst published in German 2009 as AtemschaukelEnglish translation by Philip Boehm 2012 This was an Early Reviewer book   The Hunger Angel is a work of fiction based on the real-life experiences of Herta Müller's mother and, to a greater extent, on those of her friend the poet Oskar Pastior. The novel's narrator and protagonist, Leopold Auberg, is an ethnic German from Romania who is seventeen years old in 1945. Romania had fought on the Fascist side in World War II, with families like the Aubergs being among Hitler's staunchest supporters. When Romania was overrun by the Red Army, the country not only surrendered but switched sides. In January 1945, thousands of German-speaking Romanians, Leopold among them, were shipped east to the Soviet Union and housed in labor camps where they worked to repair war damage. In the opening pages we learn very little about Leopold except that he is homosexual, and has taken to secret, anonymous rendezvous with older men in secluded parks and public bathhouses. Knowing the risk he is running, it is with a sense of relief that Leopold learns he is to be sent to Russia for a five-year labor term. Arriving at the camp--he never learns where it is--the young man finds the living conditions harsh and the work brutal, but it is his perpetual hunger which overshadows everything. Leopold uses the metaphor of the "hunger angel" to represent its constant, driving presence. Most of the novel describes the day-to-day routine in the camp and the personalities who share Leopold's privations. The Russians demand of them hard and sometimes dangerous labor, but are not otherwise especially brutal. Inmates can get passes to leave the camp on their own so they can barter their few possessions for food in the local markets. The food shortages are largely the fault of war conditions and of corruption among the Romanians chosen as camp leaders. As conditions gradually improve, Leopold even has mixed feelings about the possibility of returning to a home where he is now a stranger. The theme of the novel is the many levels of dislocation experienced by the internees. Even before deportation, Leopold is a German in a country of Romanians and a gay male in a culture that punishes homosexuality. Then he is deported to another country and a new way of existence. It doesn't end there, however. His camp experience, by narrowing his horizons to the daily struggle to find something to eat, has permanently dislocated him from his family and everything considered normal--something he realizes long before he leaves the camp to return to Romania. "How can you face the world if all you can say about yourself is that you are hungry?" Even in language there is dislocation. Certain words take on new meanings that drill themselves into Leopold's mind, just as images trigger unwelcome memories. "There are words that do whatever they want with me," Leopold writes. "They're completely different from me and they think differently from what they really are." Unfortunately the way the novel is composed doesn't quite do justice to the story it has to tell. The bulk of the narrative is a collection of anecdotal and descriptive chapters with little sense of continuity. Perhaps for this reason I didn't find the novel especially engaging or moving, despite the subject matter and the unforgettable depictions of the privations the characters endured. The metaphors, dream images, and the author's occasional flights into the realm of magical realism were more often a distraction than an enhancement to a story that had no need of such embellishments. The Hunger Angel is a worthwhile addition to the literature about wartime displacement, concentration camps, etc., but it is not among the best of its kind.
Category 12: Comedy and Satire Secret Rendezvous by Kobo AbeFirst published in Japanese 1977 English translation by Juliet Winters Carpenter 1979   Secret Rendezvous is a delightfully absurd and confounding novel. It opens with an unnamed man--all the characters in the book are nameless with the exception of one very minor character--going to an abandoned army target range where a person or creature known as "the horse" is training itself to run on four legs. The horse gives the man an assignment to conduct an investigation. The man assumes it is to investigate his own wife's disappearance. Instead, the subject of the investigation is the man himself. He is to listen to surveillance tapes the horse gives him and write a comprehensive report and analysis of his own activities over the past few days, beginning with the day his wife disappeared. The man is a sales representative for a company making athletic shoes. One night he and his wife are awakened by the arrival of an ambulance. The medics say they have orders to take the wife to the hospital. Both she and her husband are too dumbfounded to resist, nor does it occur to the man that he should ride in the ambulance with her. He doesn't even know to which hospital they have taken her. The following morning, after questioning ambulance personnel, he finally arrives at the correct hospital and confirms with the night watchman that his wife was dropped off at the emergency entrance, but there is no record or trace of her from that point. Nor does anyone in the hospital seem to care that somewhere in the bowels of the hospital is a perfectly healthy woman, lost and confused, with no money or ID and wearing nothing but a skimpy nightgown. The man eventually assumes the guise of a security staff member so he can explore the hospital on his own. He finds it is an immense labyrinth, more underground than above, with many wings long abandoned and buried. He also discovers that there is an obsession for eavesdropping, with every room bugged and many pieces of clothing containing hidden microphones. Related to this is the discovery that the chief specialty of the hospital--and the obsession of all of its staff--is research into sexual behavior and dysfunction. To call Secret Rendezvous "enigmatic" would be an understatement. The novel is a labyrinth with no way out. It is absurd, entertaining, funny, erotic, and sometimes disturbing. The most pervasive element is voyeurism, with the watcher watching the watcher watching the watcher... many levels deep at some points, culminating (or maybe not?) with the reader, perplexed but amused. 137StevenTXEdited: Jun 9, 2012, 5:58pm
Category 12: Comedy and Satire The Investigation: A Novel by Philippe ClaudelFirst published 2010 in French as L'EnquêteEnglish translation by John Cullen 2012 This was an Early Reviewer selection   The Investigator considers himself "a scrupulous, professional, careful, disciplined, and methodical person who didn't allow himself to surprised or bothered by the circumstances or individuals he was required to encounter." Therefore, when he arrives at the City to conduct his investigation at the Enterprise, and no one meets him at the train station, he waits with perfect patience despite the miserably weather. Eventually, however, he gives up and, finding no cab in sight--indeed not a human soul or vehicle--he makes his way on foot. The poor Investigator suffers one mishap after another. He is drenched, his clothes are ruined, he catches cold, and when he finally comes upon a gate to the Enterprise it is the middle of the night and he is rudely sent away. When he eventually finds a hotel, his misfortunes only deepen. The rude Giantess takes and loses his identification, the Waiter gives him nothing fit to eat, the Tourist spills scalding coffee all over him, and the Policeman accuses him of vandalizing the ladies' room! Gradually, however, this novel that starts as a slapstick comedy begins to morph into a surreal, irrational nightmare. The City and the Enterprise are not part of our world as we know it, or perhaps they are a perfect depiction of our world as we refuse to accept it. The Investigator cries out for answers: I'm tossed back and forth, bashed around, bruised and then petted, knocked over and then stood upright again. I'm placed and displaced. I'm forbidden to cross a street and then I'm led across it. I'm smiled upon, I'm embraced, I'm cheered, only to be dashed the next minute against a wall. But in return he is castigated for his insistence upon identifying people by their function: You deny all humanity in yourself and those around you. You see people and the world as an impersonal, asexual system of functions, of cogs and gears, a great mechanism without intelligence in which these functions and cogs operate in order to make it work. The author calls into question the very idea that organization is essential to society. "Man created order at a time when nothing was required of him. He thought himself clever. He's had cause to regret it." The Investigation is a philosophical novel that challenges the need for philosophy. The human mind didn't evolve as a tool for understanding the secrets of the universe, says the author, so why does man "constantly fool himself into thinking his mind can grasp everything and comprehend everything?" ...thinking is sometimes like running an empty washing machine: The exercise may serve to verify proper functioning, but the dirty laundry left outside the machine stays dirty eternally The Investigation is a wonderfully entertaining, unsettling, and thoughtful novel that takes the reader on a journey from the funny, through the absurd, to the profound.
Category 3: Rites of Passage Kangaroo Notebook by Kobo AbeFirst published in Japanese 1991 English translation by Maryellen Toman Mori 1996  While having his breakfast a man discovers that some sort of growth is covering his lower legs. Before long he realizes that they are radish plants growing out of his skin. He rushes to the nearest clinic of urology and dermatology and, after considerable effort because he has no appointment, manages to be seen by a doctor. The doctor admits that he is completely baffled, and sends the man to a spa known as Hell Valley. The man makes the trip on his self-propelled hospital bed, eventually floating down a drainage canal on a squid boat. Kangaroo Notebook has many of the elements found in Abe's other novels: characters without names, bizarre and senseless events, a cold and fatalistic tone, dysfunctional doctors, a sexually attractive but impersonal nurse, various bodily fluids and functions, and an enigmatic ending. It does, however, become quite clear that this is a novel about death, suicide, and euthanasia. In spite of the madcap hospital bed ride and the nurse trying to win the coveted "Dracula's Daughter Award" for drawing the most blood, the novel wasn't especially entertaining, nor was the discussion of euthanasia and death coherent enough to make it thoughtful, so I would only recommend Kangaroo Notebook to those readers who are particular fans of Kobo Abe.
Will revisit your review of Wolf Hall after I read it. Interesting set of books you have been reading lately and great reviews!
Category 5: Making It The Adventures of Roderick Random by Tobias SmollettFirst published 1748   The Adventures of Roderick Random is a picaresque and partly autobiographical novel depicting a young man's quest for rank and fortune. Roderick's father, the son of a Scottish laird, falls in love with and marries a woman well below his social standing. Roderick himself is the issue of this marriage. His grandfather denounces the marriage and disinherits his son. Shortly after Roderick's birth, his mother perishes. Roderick's father, driven by almost mad by grief, abandons Roderick to the presumed mercies of his grandfather and leaves the country, never to be heard from again. The grandfather wants nothing to do with Roderick and pawns him off on a boarding school. Reaching early manhood, Roderick finds himself educated as a gentleman but without funds or family. His only true friends are his maternal uncle, Tom Bowling, a naval officer, and Hugh Strap, a former schoolmate and apprentice barber who is Roderick's devoted servant and companion (the model of Sancho Panza is obvious here). Roderick's ambitions are, at first, limited and realistic. He becomes an apprentice to an apothecary and is well on his way to establishing himself in the medical profession. A romantic scandal involving the apothecary's daughter ensues, however, and Roderick is once again afoot and without prospects. His next ambition is to follow his uncle into a naval career as a ship's surgeon, but he is thwarted by the military bureaucracy where such appointments are to be had only by means of influence and bribery. Ironically, when his fortunes are almost at their lowest, he is then press-ganged into service as a common seaman. Roderick's naval career, based on Smollett's own experiences, is probably the highlight of the novel, as it depicts something of the harsh life aboard a British man-of-war during the early 18th century. Roderick's service is principally in the West Indies where the Royal Navy is conducting operations against the Spanish and French. Tropical diseases and incompetence leadership combine to wreak a fearful toll of death among the common sailors. This is, however, only the beginning of Roderick's peregrinations, which will eventually include a stint in the French army and a voyage aboard a slaver carrying a human cargo from Africa to South America. The novel satirizes the social structures of the time. Titled nobility are invariably figures of ridicule. The government, military and church are riddled with greed and corruption. Few characters at any level are what they seem, as everyone is putting on the pretense wealth and gentility in order to impress or defraud everyone else. Roderick himself frustrates the reader's attempts at sympathy. He is touchy, hot-tempered and violent. His attempts to earn his living by honest work are short-lived. Finding himself the dupe and victim of every swindler and false friend he comes across, Roderick becomes dishonest himself. Despising others for their pretense of gentility, he becomes a pretender in turn, his defense being that he is trying to restore the position that was his right by birth. He jokes about leaving a serving girl pregnant, then goes off to court rich (or seemingly rich) women for their dowries. His redemption, if we will grant it, comes only with his love for the beautiful and pure Narcissa. The appeal of The Adventures of Roderick Random as a novel comes indirectly from its portrait of English society and naval life rather than from the unlikely life story of its protagonist. Some of the better chapters are lengthy digressions into the lives of secondary characters, including a prostitute and an aspiring playwright. Overall, the novel is a picture of a world ruled by greed and pretense where honestly and hard work count for little, but a random stroke of good luck may reward the deserving.
Category 7: War, Violence and Conflict Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids by Kenzaburo OeFirst published in Japanese 1958 English translation by Paul St. John and Maki Sugiyama 1985   Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids is a brutal, brilliant novel against the craven mindset of the members of a generation who let Japan's military leadership plunge their country into disaster. The story takes place during World War II, but far away from the front of battle in a nameless setting that can be considered allegorical. It is narrated by a reform school boy who, together with a number of his fellows, has been marched into the countryside where the youths will be billeted as laborers in a farm village. All along the route, and when they finally reach the isolated village itself, the boys are treated as vermin. We get the sense that this is not because of anything they have done, but chiefly because they are outsiders with no status or authority. The boys' first task at the village is to bury an alarming number of domestic animals that have suddenly taken sick and died. When one of the villagers becomes ill, word spreads that the plague has broken out. That night the villagers silently slip away, leaving the boys to their fate. The only way out of the mountainous village is across a bridge which the villagers have blockaded and where they have left an armed guard to keep the boys from removing the barrier. The abandoned boys must now conquer their fear of the plague and forage for food and other necessities in the dead of winter. As outcasts with nowhere to go and nothing to look forward to, they must also confront the despair of being alone in a world of the small-minded, uncaring, and implacable. The novel is taut and precise. Every object and event comes to have an importance, and nothing is brought in that isn't necessary to the story, not even the narrator's name. The images are often horrifying, especially when described with a child's innocent and uninhibited fascination. Unfortunately the translation does not do full justice to the novel, as the phrasing is occasionally quite clumsy. Nonetheless, Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids is a gripping story and highly recommended.
Category 5: Making It The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas HardyFirst published 1886   Michael Henchard, the mayor of the fictional Wessex town of Casterbridge, is one of the most brilliantly drawn characters of fiction. His story begins when, as a young migrant farm laborer, he comes trudging into a small village one afternoon with his wife and infant daughter. A small fair is under way. Henchard and his wife seek refreshment, but Susan, the wife, knowingly steers her husband away from the tent where liquor is served. It is to no avail, however, as even in the dry establishment a bottle is being passed around. Before long she is wheedling her husband to stop drinking and find a place to stay the night. Henchard responds by publicly berating his spouse, then declaring he will sell her to the highest bidder. To the amazement of all present, an auction takes place and Susan Henchard and her child are sold for five guineas to a passing sailor. Many years later, Henchard is now a prosperous grain merchant and the mayor of the market town of Casterbridge. Long has he regretted his foul deed, and once in vain he searched for his wife, but little does he now suspect that Susan and her daughter will be only the first of several figures who will come back from his past. Michael Henchard is a man of great pride but cold demeanor. He is respected but not liked. "It is not by what is, in this life, but by what appears, that you are judged," he asserts. His wife's return threatens him where it will hurt the most: his respectability. Yet Henchard is also a man with a powerful sense of honor and fairness, and any act of deceit on his part gnaws at him like a cancer. His pride and his honor, at war with one another, will be the cause of his own destruction. The Mayor of Casterbridge gives us a memorable picture of 19th century life in a traditional community where Roman roads have yet to be supplanted by modern rails and whose values and superstitions owe as much to the druids as to the saints. Hardy's prose sparkles with wit while telling a tense and passionate story that has many of the characteristics of Greek tragedy. 144mamzelJun 20, 2012, 9:25am
You sold me. I just downloaded it to my Kindle.
I hope you enjoy it. (I read it on the Kindle as well.)
Nip the Buds sounds intriguing---I am putting it on my list for next year. And also maybe a Hardy-fest. I remember liking the Mayor of Casterbridge, but it's been too long.
Category 1: Love, Romance and Sex Amok and Other Stories by Stefan ZweigCollection first published 2006 with all translations by Anthea Bell   Each of the four stories in this collection is about a person with a dangerous obsession. "Amok" is a novella which comprises more than half of the book. A German doctor, impelled by an unspecified scandal, is serving a tour in rural India. He is surprised one day to be visited by a beautiful European woman whose haughty and commanding presence immediately puts him under a spell. After some evasions, he divines that what she requires is something that will endanger both their reputations. His response sends her away in a rage, but the doctor is suddenly so obsessed with helping her that there is no limit to what he will sacrifice for her sake--a woman whose name he doesn't even know. The next story, "The Star Above the Forest," would read almost as a parody of "Amok" were its language not so beautiful and sincere. A hotel waiter named François is suddenly stricken with passionate devotion for one of the guests, a beautiful Polish baroness. It instantly seems like his whole life's purpose has been fulfilled by the opportunity to serve this exquisite woman, to whom he is just an anonymous part of the hotel staff. But what will happen to François when she leaves? In "Leporella" the subject is Crescentia, an ugly, uncouth kitchen maid who has worked in contented silence for two years in a Viennese townhouse while listening to her master, the Baron, fight with his jealous wife. One day quite by accident the Baron discovers that Crescentia is from a village in the Tyrol where he enjoys hunting. He rewards her with a smile and a playful pat on the fanny, a meaningless gesture to him, but to her a touch of kindness that turns Crescentia into his devoted slave and a dangerously single-minded ally. Finally, "Incident on Lake Geneva," tells the ironic story of an illiterate Russian soldier found mysteriously floating naked on a raft in the middle of Lake Geneva in 1918. Here the dangerous obsession is not with a person but with the idea of returning home. The mysterious woman in "Amok" makes particular mention of a book she sees in the doctor's collection. It is A Sentimental Education by Flaubert, in which the hero, Frédéric Moreau, is stricken with an obsessive love at first sight for an older married woman. The obsessions in Zweig's stories may have been inspired by Moreau's, but they are even more intense and consuming. Though ostensibly tragic, they seem also to raise the question of whether it is more meaningful to live a long, mundane life fulfilling expectations, or to burn oneself out in a momentary but passionate blaze of glorious devotion.
Category 11: Crime and Punishment Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary MantelFirst published 2012    The fall of Anne Boleyn, as seen through the eyes of the man who brought it about, Thomas Cromwell, is the subject of this sequel to Wolf Hall. The two novels, together with a projected third, tell Cromwell's story as a single narrative, so Bring Up the Bodies is not meant to be read on its own. Too many references to past events and relationships would be meaningless without having first read Wolf Hall. The events portrayed in Bring Up the Bodies occupy only about nine months and concern principally just the King and his household. Relationships with the Emperor, France, and the Pope are a constant concern, but remain in the background, as does the ongoing work of remaking the English church. As the novel begins, King Henry VIII's relations with his queen, haughty and flirtatious Anne Boleyn, have soured, and, after a second miscarriage, he despairs of her ever being able to produce a male heir. In the meantime he has fallen in love with Jane Seymour, a meek and delicate young woman from one of England's most prominent families. The King needs to be rid of Anne so he can marry Jane, just as he once needed to be rid of Katherine to marry Anne, and once again it is Cromwell's job to bring it about. Mantel's portrait of Thomas Cromwell is perhaps overly sympathetic in Wolf Hall. So it begins in Bring Up the Bodies, but about midway through the novel a darker side of Cromwell begins to emerge, one which is capable of ruthlessly setting aside truth and compassion in the service of statecraft and personal ambition. What is the nature of the border between truth and lies? It is permeable and blurred because it is planted thick with rumour, confabulations, misunderstandings and twisted tales. Truth can break the gates down, truth can howl in the street; unless truth is pleasing, personable and easy to like, she is condemned to stay whimpering at the back door. Bring Up the Bodies is an engrossing and informative look at one of the most sordid episodes in English history. It also demonstrates the uncertainties and moral ambiguities with which we must contend before we can begin to understand events of the past or the present.
Category 4: Heroes and Anti-Heroes Junky by William S. BurroughsFirst published 1953 as JunkieUnexpurgated edition published 1977 as Junky  Junky, William S. Burroughs' first published novel, displays none of the experimental writing techniques that characterize Naked Lunch and other later novels. It is simply a straightforward, hard-boiled autobiographical novel about drug addiction. It begins with the narrator, William Lee's, first experience with morphine. It follows his career as an addict and occasional dealer in New York City, New Orleans, the Rio Grande Valley of Texas, and Mexico City, ending abruptly when Lee decides to leave for South America. "Junk" is the term Burroughs uses for all opium derivatives. The novel dwells extensively on the various forms of the drug, the culture of addicts and pushers, laws and enforcement practices, and the various methods for breaking an addiction. He develops and expounds his own theories on the physiology of addiction and withdrawal, which he calls "junk sickness." He addresses a number of what he calls myths about drugs, explaining, for example, that marijuana and cocaine are not physically addictive and claiming that it takes at least two months of regular use to create a heroin addiction. He also castigates a society that treats addiction as a crime rather than a "condition of being." Though Burroughs based Junky closely on his experiences, he screened out anything that wasn't directly related to drugs. He mentions a wife a couple of times, but we have no idea who she is or how she came into his life. Later there is a reference, and only one, to "the children." Nor is there ever the slightest hint that the protagonist is an intellectual associating closely with other poets and writers. The writing in Junky is mostly cold, clinical and detached. The narrator provides extensive descriptions of his symptoms, but scarcely any of his feelings. Occasionally, however, when describing a setting such as the forlorn landscape of the Texas border, the lineup of addicts in a New Orleans jail, or the shady characters in a Mexican bar, Burroughs' prose ascends to powerful and poetic heights.
Category 1: Love, Romance and Sex Queer by William S. BurroughsWritten 1951-53, first published 1985   Queer is a companion piece to Burroughs' first novel, Junky, and best read as its sequel even though they actually overlap in time. It is an autobiographical novel depicting the author's period in Mexico City in the early 1950s after curing himself of heroin addiction, followed by a trip to Ecuador in search of an hallucinogenic drug called "Yage" which rumor said could stimulate telepathic powers. As in Junky, Burroughs names his alter-ego William Lee. One of the symptoms of withdrawal from opiates is an intense sexual craving. Lee's desire for a young man named Eugene Allerton is the underlying theme of the novel. He pursues Allerton through the bars of Mexico City. The youth isn't homosexual, but is willing to put up with Lee's attentions in return for the drinks and meals he buys him. Allerton eventually gives in and agrees to accompany Lee on his Ecuador trip. Queer isn't an exceptional novel on its own, but when juxtaposed against Junky it makes for a remarkably revealing reading experience. The William Lee of Junky is a man in control of everything but his drug habit. He is focused, businesslike, confident and dignified, even when penniless and dressed in rags. The William Lee of Queer, off the drug habit but drinking heavily to compensate, is brash, obnoxious, insecure, rambling, and, in the author's own words, "painful to watch." Significantly, Junky is written in first person while Queer, except for the epilogue, is in third person. It's as if Burroughs off junk is a stranger even to himself. Queer was written in the 1950s on the heels of the events it portrays, but because of its pervasive (but never graphic) references to homosexuality it wasn't published until 1985. William Burroughs wrote, at that time, an introduction which is actually much better than the novel itself and just as revealing. He brings up finally the subject that he could not bear to address in his novels, the fact that during the events portrayed in Junky and Queer Burroughs accidentally shot and killed his wife. In fact, if you own both books I would recommend that you first read the 1985 introduction to Queer, then read Junky, then come back and read Queer.
Category 11: Crime and Punishment Red Harvest by Dashiell HammettFirst published 1929   Hammett's first novel is an intricate masterpiece of crime, revenge, and moral ambiguity. The narrator, whose name is never given, is a private detective working for the Continental Detective Agency. He is summoned to the mining town of Personville (modeled after Butte, Montana) by the local newspaper editor. He never gets a chance to meet his client, however, for the editor is murdered at the very hour in which they were supposed to have met. The detective soon learns that there is good reason why Personville is more often referred to as "Poisonville." Gangsters have an angle on every business in town, and there isn't a business or agency that isn't corrupt. Any uneasy peace hangs over Personville, but the editor's murder is the first in a chain of events that will soon have rival gangs and police in a state of war where alliances are made and broken by the hour. At the center of everything is the narrator and his dubious ally Dinah Brand, the local femme fatale. Hammett's witty and laconic phrases have given birth to many of the clichés of the crime genre, but they also are part of a powerful descriptive language. He also manages to spin out a complex plot with a score or more of characters in such a way that the reader is never lost, only eager to see where the next twist will lead.
The William Burroughs reviews are very interesting. I've, of course, heard about him - and that he shot his wife doing a William Tell sort of thing - but I've never read him. Odd, while reading your reviews I realized I was translating the term "novel" to mean "slightly veiled autobiography."
I haven't read much Hammett, but he fascinates me. Have you read Lillian Hellman's essay about the turtle which is obviously a tribute to Dash, as she called him. It seems that he was a bit hard-boiled himself.
Category 6: Adventure In the Heart of the Seas by Shmuel Yosef AgnonFirst published in Hebrew 1933 English translation by I. M. Lask 1948   In the Heart of the Seas is a short novel depicting the journey of a group of Jews from eastern Europe to Jerusalem circa 1800. Their starting point is the author's home town of Buczacz, a village in Polish Galicia which was at that time part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. (It is now in the Ukraine and known as Buchach.) The band travels overland to the mouth of the Danube on the Black Sea, where they take ship for Istanbul, sailing from there to Israel (at that time part of the Ottoman Empire). The novel is written in the stylized language of a legend or medieval travelogue, complete with a sense of wonder and the naïve acceptance of every outlandish story or rumor. The travelers marvel at the strange appearance and practices of the natives of every land, but no less at the different ways in which their fellow Jews of various localities practice their faith. It is a gentle and warm-hearted story with no villains. There is no evidence of anti-Semitism; their journey is an act of devotion, not an escape from persecution. And there is plenty of humor, though often at the expense of women, such as when one Rabbi says: "It is not good for a man to be alone; and when his wife is with him it is no good either. God forbid that I should complain about my virtuous paragon; but if you wish to study or you wish to think some pure thoughts, up she comes with her talk and you have to devote your heart to what is a waste of time." The central character is a man named Hananiah, a man whose faith and simplicity exemplify the ideals of his religion and lead him to be credited with miracles. The descriptions of Hananiah's deeds and values have a particularly Biblical quality. Indeed, much of the novel is devoted to descriptions of religious practices and discussions on matters of faith between the various characters. Knowing very little about Judaism, I found some of the theology a bit tedious, but was fascinated in the various ways in which the idea of the Land of Israel is central to Judaism.
Category 9: Incredible Worlds Coin Locker Babies by Ryū Murakami First published in Japanese 1980 English translation by Stephen Snyder 1995   Growing up in a hostile world with the knowledge that you were callously abandoned by the mother who had just given you birth--that is the challenge facing the two protagonists of Coin Locker Babies. In 1972 Kiku's mother seals him in a box and locks him in a public coin locker in a Tokyo train station. Hours later his screams alert passersby, and he is rescued. He is raised at a Catholic orphanage where he meets Hashi, a boy his own age who was likewise abandoned in a coin locker. Estranged from the other orphans, the two develop a brotherly bond. When they reach school age, long after the more desirable children have been adopted, the pair are taken together by an older couple who live on an island off the coast of Kyushu. Kiku and Hashi have both undergone psychological treatment for their recurrent nightmares and their inability to socialize. Eventually the two begin to develop in opposite directions. Kiku is solitary, athletic, and prone to violence. He rages inwardly against, not only his mother, but all of humanity. His only escape is in the sport of pole vaulting which gives him the sense of soaring above and away from other people. Hashi, on the other hand, craves affection and reassurance. He is effeminate, detests sports, loves music, and wishes he could meet his mother and ask her why she abandoned him. Growing up he discovers that he has a remarkable talent for singing and that he is bisexual. Both boys wind up in Tokyo. There Kiku meets a young woman named Anemone who is his kindred spirit. Though she is a beautiful and popular model, her only companion--until she meets Kiku--is her pet crocodile, on whose behalf she has converted her condo into a tropical swamp. Anemone dreams of a world purged of humanity, a dense steaming jungle where she and Kiku live with their reptilian friends. Hashi, meanwhile, has found his way into "Toxitown," a section of Tokyo contaminated by industrial pollution and cordoned off by authorities. It has become home to a variety of outcasts and criminals and features a market where rich clients from the city can find prostitutes catering to their most bizarre inclinations. Coin Locker Babies is a dark and violent novel abounding in scenes of decay and corruption. It is built on the disturbing idea that we are indelibly marked by the events of even our earliest infancy. Both Kiku and Hashi seem doomed to spend a lifetime living out the consequences of the hours they each spent in a coin locker. They live in a crowded and decadent world where love and charity are suffocated by deceit, greed and exploitation. The entire world is, to them, nothing but an extension of that claustrophobic coin locker. Murakami set most of his novel ten years into the future (writing in the 1970s of the 1980s), so technically Coin Locker Babies is a work of dystopian science fiction, though it is the psychological element which predominates. The book is double the length of Murakami's other novels, and while the plot drags a bit in the middle, it is overall a thoughtful and often gripping novel recommended for those who can tolerate its graphic violence and misanthropic mood.
Category 11: Crime and Punishment Farewell, My Lovely by Raymond ChandlerFirst published 1940   Private Detective Philip Marlowe ju st happens to get caught up in the middle of a crime scene involving the murder of a black man in a cheap dive. Soon he's being summoned out of the blue to act as a bodyguard for a wealthy playboy who's trying to ransom some stolen jewels. One thing leads to another, a femme fatale comes into the picture, and before long Marlowe's dealing with gamblers, fortune tellers, crooked cops, drug dealers, and a lovesick giant in a story that runs the gamut from high society to skid row. His challenge is to figure out which parts of the puzzle fit together, and which parts are unrelated. Marlowe's self-deprecating dry wit makes for fun reading, such as when he's desperate for work because "my bank account was trying to crawl under a duck." But equally striking, and occasionally surprising, is his humanity, such as when feeding liquor to an alcoholic old woman to get information out her, he says sarcastically "I liked getting her drunk for my own sordid purposes. I was a swell guy. I enjoyed being me." In the genre of crime fiction, Philip Marlowe leans towards the soft-boiled side, being a tough guy with a soft heart who is ready to find good motives behind bad actions. Farewell, My Lovely is good, well-written entertainment with a literary touch and a streak of compassion. Just be forewarned that there are some strong racial epithets in the first couple of chapters.
In the Heart of the Seas sounds very unusual. Where do you find your books? It seems like you don't read anything that isn't fairly critically acclaimed, yet many of them aren't very well known.
Where do you find your books?I got started reading literature about a dozen years ago when I ran across a list by the Modern Library of the 100 Greatest English Language Novels of the 20th Century. Since then, I've been something of a collector of lists of books, and of books about books, and that's where I get most of my shopping lists and reading ideas. In the Heart of the Seas, for example, was recommended in The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages by Harold Bloom and in 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die by Peter Boxall. Most of my books come from local used book stores, but in this case I think I ordered it used from Amazon. I read it at this time because the Reading Globally group in LT is doing a quarterly theme on Middle Eastern literature.
Ah, that makes sense! I've got a few books on books, and I find lists, print them out but then forget about them. Sounds like you'll never run out of books.
Your review of Farewell, My Lovely reminds me that I really need to read some Raymond Chandler. I think I have The Big Sleep already, so there's really no excuse!
Category 11: Crime and Punishment And Then There Were None by Agatha ChristieFirst published 1939 as Ten Little NiggersAlso published as Ten Little Indians  And Then There Were None is a "locked room" mystery. Ten people are invited under various pretenses to a tiny island where there is only one large house. Each of these people carries a secret guilt. Arriving at the island they discover that their host, a person they've never met, isn't there. Then, one by one, they start dying. Due to a storm there is no way on or off the island, and there is no place to hide. One among them must be the murderer. The novel is a clever and suspenseful puzzle, but highly contrived and entirely implausible. I don't have much of a taste for crime fiction to begin with, but based on my recent reading of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler I prefer stories of the more realistic "hard boiled" American style over English "whodunits" such as this one.
Category 3: Rites of Passage The Alchemist by Paulo CoelhoFirst published 1988 in Portuguese as O AlquimistaEnglish translation by Alan R. Clarke 1993   The Alchemist is an allegorical story of a young man's spiritual development. Santiago is an educated Andalusian youth who has chosen to become a shepherd because he likes to travel. He dreams twice about the Egyptian Pyramids, and consults a Gypsy woman to see what it means. The woman tells him he must journey to Egypt where he will find his treasure. Then he meets a King who tells him he must fulfill his Personal Legend and pay attention to Omens. Later, on his journey to Egypt, Santiago meets an Alchemist and learns about the Soul of the World. The spiritual/philosophical basis of The Alchemist seems to be a combination of equal parts Christianity, Pantheism, Medieval mysticism, and every speech by every corporate motivator and pimply high school valedictorian ever inflicted upon a restive audience. "Follow your dream and don't give up!" pretty well sums up any useful message one might draw from this novel. As for the more occult elements, the Alchemist's telling Santiago to be one with the Soul of the World sounds curiously like Obi-wan saying "Use the Force, Luke!" This is basically a self-help book with a thin veneer of narrative, so if you don't buy the message there isn't much point to the novel itself. It's sold millions of copies and has legions of devoted fans, but then millions of people read horoscopes every day as well. Maybe that's where they find the Omen that will lead them to their Personal Legend.
Category 3: Rites of Passage Sixty-Nine by Ryū MurakamiFirst published in Japanese 1987 English translation by Ralph F. McCarthy 1993   Kensuke Yazaki is a 17-year-old student in his final year of high school in 1969. It is a turbulent year in Japan as elsewhere. Since the beginning of the year protests against the Vietnam war by students at Tokyo University have paralyzed the campus. Kensuke lives in Sasebo, Nagasaki Prefecture, where the roar of Phantom jets from a nearby American base is a constant reminder of the war. So Kensuke's thoughts never stray far from... girls. What else would a 17-year-old boy be thinking of? Kensuke, who prefers to be called "Ken," has a sharp and inventive mind but middling ambitions. He would be satisfied with almost any girl until a chance comment causes him to set his sights at the very top: Kazuko Matsui, the queen of the school's English Drama Club and known to the boys as "Lady Jane" (from the Rolling Stones' song). Lady Jane, in spite of her pure reputation and innocent Bambi eyes, is all in sympathy with the student protests. This is all it takes to turn Ken into the school's leading radical voice and get him into more trouble than he can imagine. Compared to Murakami's earlier novels such as Almost Transparent Blue and Coin Locker Babies, Sixty-Nine is light almost to a fault. Aside from the language you would expect from teenage boys, there is nothing here to shock or offend--no violence or drugs and only a lot of wishful thinking where sex is concerned. The book doesn't attempt to grapple with the issues of the time, but is simply a portrait of teenage life in 1969 as the author himself no doubt experienced it. In the end we see that Ken has somehow managed to do the right things for all the wrong reasons and has come to a fuller perception, if not an understanding, of himself and his world.
Category 5: Making It The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle by Tobias SmollettFirst published 1751    Peregrine Pickle is a young man born to a prosperous but unprepossessing merchant, Gamaliel Pickle, who has retired prematurely to the English countryside. Sent away for schooling, Peregrine demonstrates a remarkably defiant and independent character, as well as a lifelong penchant for elaborate and excessive practical jokes. He returns from school to discover that his mother, having in the meantime born two other children, has unaccountably refused to recognize Peregrine as her own. His spineless father refuses to intervene, so young Peregrine escapes to the refuge offered by his father's neighbor, Commodore Trunnion. Commodore Trunnion, a retired seafarer, and his confederates Lieutenant Hatchway and Bosun Pipes, are the source of most of the humor in the novel, with their relentless use of nautical jargon and metaphor. Living in a house they call the "garrison," equipped with hammocks rather than beds, Trunnion and his shipmates are delighted with the high-spirited Peregrine, and the Commodore not only sponsors the young man's college education, but a trip abroad to France and Holland where Peregrine not only encounters a host of eccentric characters, but also develops unfortunately extravagant tastes and appetites. Prior to his sojourn on the Continent, however, Peregrine has met the love of his life, the beautiful and virtuous Emilia. Their on and off again love affair will dominate the latter half of the novel in a typical sequence of prideful rebuffs and jealous misunderstandings. In this respect The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle is something of a transition between the picaresque novel and the "marriage plot" convention that dominated 19th-century fiction. Love and marriage are never to be disassociated from social class and fortune, and rare is the suitor who, on bended knee, declares his love for his beloved without mentioning his net worth in the same breath. Peregrine's life is a cautionary tale on the perils of pride and extravagance. Our young hero liberally dispenses charity, but takes offense at its being offered to him when he, in turn, is in need. He goes through a disastrous spell as a high-roller, attempting to ingratiate himself into English society, only to learn that an aristocratic title conveys neither good character nor sound judgment. At his high points he rejects his friends (and Emilia) as beneath him; at his low points he refuses their help and love in shame. The novel is flawed, perhaps fatally, by lengthy digressions into the life stories of characters who have little or nothing to do with Peregrine. The first and longest of these, subtitled "The Memoirs of a Lady of Quality," is the story of a young woman who marries first for love, then after the death of her husband, is talked by her father into an arranged marriage with a despicable English lord. The lady, in her attempt to free herself from her despised spouse, eventually becomes the mistress of a succession of noble patrons. This is an interesting digression into the sad plight of women caught in a legal system that favors the husband, but its telling is devoid of anything that will emotionally engage the reader. Likewise the later digressions into the life histories of disinherited youths. Satire is the chief purpose of the novel. Smollett pokes fun at the English aristocracy and clergy, but also shows the inferior characteristics of French autocracy. He also settles what is obviously a personal vendetta against publishers and untrustworthy sponsors. One of the more interesting episodes of the novel is when Peregrine, frustrated at Emelia's defense of her chastity, resolves to bed the first wench he sees. He literally buys a teenage girl from her indigent mother, then takes pleasure in educating her, a la Pygmalion's Galatea and "My Fair Lady," and passing her off at Court as a member of the gentry. Smollett also pokes fun at the medical profession: "His noble patron was seized with an apoplecitc fit, from which he was recovered by the physicians that they might dispatch him according to rule." Though this is not a bawdy novel, there is more sexual candor in this 1751 publication than you will find a century hence. There is a revealing episode in debtors' prison in which it is admitted that male and female inmates routinely cohabitate (prisoners being obliged to rent their apartments from the warden). The double standard is much in evidence, as Peregrine consorts frequently with courtesans and common whores but wouldn't dream of marrying a woman who wasn't a virgin. Altogether Peregrine Pickle is more an interesting novel than an enjoyable one. It gives us a memorable picture of mid-18th century life, but overlong digressions, a predictable plot, and limited humorous diversion after the opening chapters make the middle half of the novel more tedious than entertaining.
So that much be a picture of the purchased wench - sounds like this is one of those novels that was published in pieces and wandered about as the author decided what to write next.
Actually the picture is of Peregrine rescuing the fair and chaste Emilia from a fire at an inn where they were both staying (a fire which he set in an attempt to find a way into her room to seduce her, but which gets out of hand). The novel says Emilia was clad "only in her shift." Here is another rendition by the same artist of the same episode: 
Category 6: Adventure Journey to the West by Wu Cheng'en16th century Chinese English translation by W. J. F. Jenner 1993   Journey to the West is an epic fantasy adventure compiled in the 16th century by Wu Cheng’en from a body of oral and written sources. The setting is the Tang Dynasty (7th to 10th centuries), and the novel depicts in allegorical form the growing influence of Buddhism on China and its fusion with Taoism and Confucianism. The novel begins with the birth and early history of its principal character, Monkey. He is a creature of divine origins born from a sacred stone on the Mountain of Flowers and Fruit many thousands of years ago. Not content with being king of a nation of monkeys, he seeks out a Taoist master from whom he learns magical powers so potent that Monkey dares to defy Heaven itself. For this he is imprisoned by the Tathagata Buddha under a mountain for five hundred years. Next we have the background of the Buddhist priest Sanzang, himself once an immortal but banished to mortal life as punishment for a careless misdeed. He has now purified his soul through ten reincarnations. He is chosen by the Tang Emperor for a monumental task: Sanzang is to journey from China to India where he will find the Tathagata Buddha atop Vulture Peak. He is to obtain copies of the holy Buddhist scriptures so that the people of China may improve their conduct and well-being. Sanzang is, frankly, a rather pathetic creature, pure though he may be, and could not get across town on his own, much less across a continent. Fortunately he has the divine aid of the Bodhisattva Guanyin, who frees Monkey and converts him to Buddhism so that he can be Sanzang’s guide and protector. Later he is joined by two other reformed immortals: Pig and Friar Sand. The great majority of the novel’s 100 chapters are devoted to the journey itself and the series of adventures that befall the four monks. Most of the adventures follow the same format: They come to a particularly dangerous-looking mountain, forest or city. Sanzang quails in fear, but Monkey reassures him, but provides some prudent warning. Sanzang then ignores Monkey’s warnings, blunders right into the danger and gets himself captured by some evil spirit. Monkey fights a mighty battle to recover his master, but eventually must either resort to trickery or summon divine aid to save the day. Most of the demons and monsters they face are supernatural creatures that have escaped from their heavenly masters and assumed human form. They are particularly eager to capture Sanzang because he is so pure that his flesh has special properties. The male demons will gain immortality by eating him, the female demons by mating with him. Chinese culture has for centuries been built upon a fusion of Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism, and Journey to the West, while it is most favorable to Buddhism, reflects that fusion. Monkey calls upon Taoist deities as frequently as he does Buddhist ones, and recommends the study of Confucius as well as the Buddhas and Laozi. The particular Taoists represented in the novel, however, are mostly (and spectacularly) evil, as was Monkey himself as a Taoist before his conversion to Buddhism. Though many abridgements have been published over the centuries, the 100 chapter version of Journey to the West is the authoritative one. It is delightfully easy to read, with some very inventive situations and plenty of humorous banter between the clever Monkey and the selfish, simple-minded Pig. With only three characters of any consequence, it is not only an easy book to digest but one that is easy to put aside and pick up days or weeks later. This may be inevitable as some of the adventures do begin to be a bit repetitive, and the novel, in the excellent 4-volume Foreign Language Press edition, is over 2300 pages long. Journey to the West is a cultural treasure that anyone with a serious interest in Chinese literature should read, but it is also an entertaining and amusing adventure story.
Category 7: War, Violence and Conflict The Things They Carried by Tim O'BrienA collection of linked stories first published in book form 1990   The Things They Carried is a gut-wrenching account of the author's Vietnam War experience. It is a series of stories, some published independently, worked into a novel with connective material. In some chapters O'Brien relates his own experiences; in others he talks about members of his infantry platoon. There is the moral dilemma of whether to fight a war he doesn't believe in or run from the draft, his first experiences with death, the grinding effect of continual fear, the episodes of playful and irresponsible adolescent behavior, the guilt of being safe in a hospital while your comrades are in combat, and the dislocation of post-war return to civilian life. O'Brien is a naturally gifted storyteller, and his chapters are captivating even as they are horrifying. There is never the sense that the author goes out of the way to shock, but rather that these are memories that insist on being shared that they may be subsumed into a collective conscience. O'Brien even tells the reader, in effect, on several occasions that these stories are true, even if they aren't always real, and that they are his memories, even if they weren't his experiences. That the writer so clearly reveals himself as a writer doesn't seem to lessen the novel's impact in the least, but adds a dimension of insight into the cathartic and curative power of literature.
>167 I think I've had this book lying around for about 10 years or so and have never summoned the courage to actually read it. I just might finally be ready to give it a shot sometime soon! Great review.
Category 8: A Sense of Place A Mind at Peace by Ahmet Hamdi TanpınarFirst published in Turkish 1949 as HuzurEnglish translation by Erdağ Göknar 2008   "What is it that should be done?" This is the central question of A Mind at Peace at both the public and personal levels. The novel is set on the eve of World War II in Istanbul, Turkey. Its protagonist, Mümtaz, is a young, unmarried academic and would-be novelist. He is principally occupied at the moment, however, with caring for his older cousin İhsan who suffers from what appears likely to be a fatal case of pneumonia. İhsan had been Mümtaz's guardian and mentor ever since the latter's parents died as a result of the Greek invasion of Anatolia in 1919--events which Mümtaz recalls at the beginning of the novel. Mümtaz also reflects ruefully upon his recently broken love affair with Nuran, a divorced woman slightly older than Mümtaz. In the long walks he takes to escape from the sick room, every sight and sound seems to recall the times he spent with Nuran. After this prologue, the novel shifts back a year or more in time to Mümtaz's first meeting with Nuran. It is a relationship we know is doomed to failure, but not how or why. In the meantime, the two lovers, enraptured with one another, spend many idle hours in all seasons exploring their city--from palaces to bazaars, from waterways to ancient ruins. Eventually Mümtaz even wonders "Do we love each other or the Bosphorus?" On a par with their passion for Istanbul is the pair's enthusiasm for traditional Turkish music. There are lengthy discussions about it, as well as sessions where Nuran's uncle, a noted vocalist, and his friends perform for guests. (It's a shame that the novel couldn't have included a CD to satisfy readers' inevitable curiosity about the folk music described in such rapturous terms.) Notwithstanding the love story and travelogue, A Mind at Peace is essentially a novel of ideas. It is August 1939, and the world is obviously on the brink of another great war. The Turks have no reason to expect that they won't be involved, but should they just let the currents of history carry them into another bloodbath? What is the responsibility of the individual, especially of the intellectual, at times like this? After long talks with his cousin, Mümtaz asks himself: "Maybe İhsan does have a point! This society wants ideas and maybe even a struggle out of me. Not romantic posturing! But to achieve this end must I forget about Nuran?" There is obviously much of Hamlet's "To be, or not to be..." in Mümtaz's dilemma. Readers of Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities will also find themselves on familiar ground with a protagonist full of ideas but lacking in direction. In contrast to Mümtaz there is Suad, a key character introduced fairly late in the novel, who is his mirror image: a man of intellectual attainment but impulsive, irresponsible, self-indulgent and proud of his Sadean amorality. Nuran, in contrast to both of these men, is centered on her feelings, her family, and her cultural roots. In the author's words, "Nuran depended on a minimum level of selfhood. She lived through her milieu." A Mind at Peace is a great novel that brings forth ideas of epic scale out of an intimate story, and does so against an unforgettable historical and cultural backdrop. The principal characters, notwithstanding their penchant for philosophical abstracts, are convincingly complete and complex. The author's prose, beautifully translated, has an evocative and lyrical quality in keeping with the musical theme running through the novel. Here, for example, is a passage describing Nuran: "Not a single spot existed on her small face with which he wasn't familiar. For Mümtaz, her face became his panorama of the soul: the way it blossomed to love like a flower, closed definitively upon a despairing smile--the metallic radiance burning in her eyes asquint--and not least of all the way her face changed by degrees like a daybreak over the Bosphorus.... With a look, she dressed him up and stripped him down, at one moment turning him into a pitiful, forsaken malcontent with no recourse but Allah, and at the next into the very master of his fate." For both its profound discussion of ideas central to the human condition and its vivid portrayal of a place, a time and a people, A Mind at Peace is highly recommended.
Category 5: Making It Agnes Grey by Anne BrontëFirst published 1847   Anne Brontë's novel Agnes Grey is largely autobiographical. Agnes, the narrator, is the daughter of a poor clergyman. She is, however, quite well-educated. When her father foolishly squanders the family's capital in an unwise investment, Agnes goes out at the age of 18 to seek work as a governess. In two successive positions, Agnes finds herself nominally in charge of spoiled and willful children who treat her as their servant rather than their mentor. With no support from the children's parents, poor Agnes more often than not must take the blame for her charges' misbehavior. Eventually, however, she has cause to hope that love and fulfillment will finally come her way. The chief interest in the novel is its harsh portrayal of the English middle and upper classes of the day. Always grasping for wealth and position, their lives are devoid of any romantic sentiment or domestic affection. Fathers celebrate their sons' cruelties as evidence that they will succeed in life. Mothers marry their daughters off for the sake of a title and an estate to men they despise. Agnes herself is not an entirely likable heroine. Prone to priggishness, she makes herself a martyr to her poverty and moral rectitude, refusing to stand up or speak out for herself and making happiness fight its way through her defenses. Without the name "Brontë" attached to it, this is a novel that probably would have faded into obscurity decades ago. While it is well-written, it offers few insights, and the plot is painfully predictable. Fortunately it is short enough it can be read as a specimen and for biographical insight. Brontë's later novel, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, is much more rewarding.
Category 3: Rites of Passage Deep River by Shūsaku EndōFirst published in Japanese 1993 English translation by Van C. Gessel 1994   Four members of a Japanese tour group visiting the sacred sites in India each have their own deep and personal reasons for this journey. On the banks of the River Ganges they will find, if not the answers they seek, at least a measure of illumination. Isobe, a strict and traditional Japanese businessman, has watched his wife die of cancer. The woman he has taken for granted for many years suddenly commands his attention, and he feels too late the love he has never shown her. Her dying words stun him: "I know for sure...I'll be reborn somewhere in this world. Look for me...find me." Mitsuko is a spoiled and callous young college student. Just for the fun of it, she seduces Otsu, a serious, awkward, and naïve member of Japan's Catholic minority. She taunts him about his faith, but can't erase from her mind the ideas of humanity, sacrifice and redemption he clumsily defends. Years later, finding her life an empty and meaningless shell, Mitsuko seeks out Otsu. Kiguchi is an aging veteran of Japan's disastrous campaign in Burma during World War II. He is haunted and hardened by memories of the Highway of Death, Japan's final retreat, where hundreds of his comrades died of starvation. Kiguchi was kept alive by a sacrifice whose horrific nature he has only recently learned. His journey to the Buddhist shrines of India is an homage to friend and enemy alike. Numanda, a writer of children's stories, attributes his miraculous recovery from lung disease to his constant companion, a myna bird. In a spirit of celebration and gratitude, Numanda makes a pilgrimage to the bird's native forests in India. The four travelers come to Varanasi (formerly Benaras). Here, on the banks of the sacred Ganges, they witness an ongoing celebration of life, death, and renewal, as pilgrims bathe in and drink the same waters where the ashes of the cremated dead are committed. They see the extremes of luxury and poverty, of selfless sacrifice and religious violence. Here, also, they find Otsu, the serious young man whom Mitsuko once teased. Otsu has finally become a priest, but has been ostracized by the Church for his heretical ideas, ideas which are central to the novel. All religions worship the same god, he believes, and the idea of Jesus and his sacrifice is present in many forms including the Hindu ritual enacted daily on the Ganges. Every selfless act is an affirmation of God, and the forms in which we worship are immaterial. Deep River is rich in religious symbolism and metaphor, but even readers who don't relate to its fundamentally Christian spiritual content will find relevance in the underlying humanism and spirit of self-discovery in the novel. The well-drawn characters and vivid depiction of the spiritual heart of India also make this a book well worth reading. 172StevenTXEdited: Aug 26, 2012, 12:21am
Category 12: Comedy and Satire Popular Hits of the Showa Era by Ryu MurakamiFirst published in Japanese 1994 English translation by Ralph McCarthy 2011   Popular Hits of the Showa Era is a dark and violent comedy satirizing the emptiness of modern urban life. Six young men from the suburbs of Tokyo have lives centered around video games, girly magazines and junk food. The get together occasionally at a member's apartment to dine on vending machine snacks, play endless games of rock paper scissors, and keep a watch on a nearby apartment in hopes of catching sight of an especially shapely neighbor at her window. The are most enthusiastic, however, when it comes to karaoke. Once a month or so they get drunk, dress up in costumes and drive off to a deserted beach in the middle of the night where they set up a mock stage and perform execrable pop tunes to an audience of crabs and sea lice. Six middle-aged suburban women have likewise formed an informal group called the "Midori Society" because they all happen to be named Midori. They are all divorced, lonely, unloved, and unappreciated. In Japan such women are known as "oba-sans." The also like karaoke, and meet regularly at a karaoke bar in the vain hope of finding love. One day a particularly unbalanced member of the male group makes a vulgar gesture towards one of the oba-sans. When she rails at him in response, he takes out a knife and slashes her throat. This random killing baffles the police, but the other members of the Midori Society blunder upon a clue that leads them to the killer. Thus begins a blood feud between the two groups that grows to outlandish proportions. The irony is that the members of the two groups only begin to find fulfillment in their lives when they focus on violence and revenge. Murakami has skillfully combined a bleak picture of modern life and popular culture with outrageous satire and black humor. This is a novel that would be disturbing if you took it seriously, but it certainly isn't meant to be.
Lots of interesting stuff here! You're right that Agnes Grey wouldn't be so famous if it weren't written by a Brontë, but I love the difference in worldview it reveals between Anne and her sisters. If Anne had written Jane Eyre, Mr. Rochester wouldn't have been the hero. (In fact, St. John Rivers probably would. Unpleasant thought.) I also enjoyed your thoughts on Deep River. I have been meaning to get to some Shūsaku Endō for a while now.
Category 6: Adventure Voss by Patrick WhiteFirst published 1957   Voss is a superb novel combining elements of adventure, romance, and spirituality. The setting is Australia in the mid 19th century. We first meet Laura Trevelyan, a young woman orphaned in early childhood and living with her aunt and uncle, the Bonners, in Sydney. Mr. Bonner is a prosperous fabric merchant, so Laura has had a very advantageous upbringing. She is of a reserved and chilly temperament, however, and is unfashionably well read. She also rejects the religious orthodoxy of the community and is generally aloof from society. Mr. Bonner has recently undertaken to sponsor an expedition that will attempt the first European crossing of the Australian continent. The leader of the expedition will be Johann Ulrich Voss, a German whose origins and motives remain an enigma, but who is supremely confident in his own abilities. Voss is entertained on occasion at the Bonner house, where the fastidious Mr. and Mrs. Bonner find the German's manners abrupt and uncouth. They are not accustomed to a man who says what he thinks, or, for that matter, who thinks much at all. It is a different story, however, with Laura, who finds her brief conversations with Voss both intriguing and infuriating. Though no sign of affection has passed between the two in their few moments together, after the expedition departs both Voss and Laura realize they are in love. The expedition consists of a handful of volunteers plus two native guides. They take their provisions with them in the form of a small herd of cattle, sheep and goats. But the waterless desert takes its toll on animals and men. The seasons change, and suddenly it is disease and flooding with which they must contend. Before long it is more a question of survival than success, and discord becomes mutiny. White's descriptions of the landscape, the men's physical suffering, and their mental anguish are vivid and memorable. In alternating chapters we follow the ordeals of Laura and Voss. Keeping her feelings for the explorer a secret, the young woman further alienates herself from family and friends by her moody temperament and social indifference. She and Voss begin to see each other in their dreams, and even believe they are communicating spiritually. Their relationship begins to take on a religious context, and as they each independently face their greatest crisis, Laura begins to see Voss as a Christ figure while in his hallucinations he sees her in a form resembling the Virgin Mary. The novel has many biblical allusions, from the ordeal in wilderness, to Abraham's willingness to sacrifice Isaac, to a virgin birth of sorts, to a Judas figure. The author does not appear, however, to be supporting a theology as much as he is placing his characters' spiritual dilemma in a context of Christian symbolism. There is no cut and dried message here. Neither of the principal characters is fully revealed to the reader, nor are they entirely likable. What starts out as a romantic adventure becomes a novel on an entirely different plane. Voss is indeed both a thoughtful and a disturbing work and most highly recommended.
Category 11: Crime and Punishment Piercing by Ryu MurakamiFirst published in Japanese 1994 English translation by Ralph McCarthy 2007 As a child, Kawashima Masayuki was physically and mentally tortured by his mother before being placed in an institution. As a result he hears a mysterious inner voice and is periodically overcome by the desire to stab a woman, any woman, with an ice pick. When he suddenly finds himself one night standing over his infant daughter, ice pick in hand, Kawashima decides the only way to get this compulsion out of his system is to actually kill someone. A woman he doesn't know. A prostitute. Little does Kawashima suspect that the call girl he picks as his victim, Sanada Chiaki, is even more messed up than he is. Sexually abused as a child by her father, Chiaki is prone to violent personality changes, sudden rages, and self mutilation. When the two come together the result is a dark--very dark--comedy of errors as each assumes the other is acting rationally, which triggers even more bizarre reactions. Whose psychosis will prevail? Piercing is a fast-paced thriller, sometimes morbidly funny, but not for the squeamish.
@165 Poor chaste Emilia. :) Think I'll pass on Piercing though. I'm not always squeamish.
As I'm always looking for something to rival In the Miso Soup from Ryū Murakami and see you've read a few of his books recently, which has been your favourite? The 3 others of his that I've read so far didn't quite match up.
Category 8: A Sense of Place Midaq Alley by Naguib MahfouzFirst published in Arabic 1947 English translation by Trevor Le Gassick 1966   Midaq Alley is a small, narrow street, but a community unto itself. Here, amid the feverish bustle of wartime Cairo, life goes on as it seems it always will. Uncle Kamil naps at the door of his sweets shop. The baker's wife berates her husband. Salim Alwan is busy making money and taking aphrodisiacs to feed his timeless libido. Mrs. Saniya Afify decides to put an end to years of widowhood and visit the professional matchmaker. Zaita the beggarmaker gives one of his clients a profitable new deformity. And Abbas the young barber gazes longingly at a window in hopes of catching a glimpse of Hamida, the girl he adores. Hamida herself is the central character of the novel. An orphaned girl taken in by the matchmaker, she has few prospects in life despite her beauty. She dresses in rags. Her gorgeous thigh-length hair smells of the kerosene she uses to kill the lice. Yet she has an unconquerable pride and a fearsome temper. Even when she is fond of a man, she can't help lashing out with her sharp tongue at every chance, and she seems stubbornly determined to spurn the few opportunities life hands her. In this community of generally high religious values there is also Kirsha, the café owner. Late in life he has developed a fondness for hashish, as well as for the intimate company of young men. His loud arguments with his wife and adult son have made him the scandal Midaq Alley. Yet the same group continues to gather daily at Kirsha's café for their evening tea and a smoke. The novel takes place in the mid-1940s when the air raids and the threat of German occupation have passed, but the city is still a hub of military activity. The Allied armies provide both an economic windfall, with jobs aplenty for young men, but also the temptations to vice. There is still, however, a sense of timelessness that leaves Midaq Alley, not isolated, but somehow insulated from the passing centuries. This novel is like an exquisitely painted miniature depicting all of life's pleasures and sorrows in a tiny frame.
Category 11: Crime and Punishment In the Miso Soup by Ryu MurakamiFirst published in Japanese 1997 English translation by Ralph McCarthy 2003  The narrator of In the Miso Soup is Kenji, a twenty-year old man who works as a freelance "nightlife guide." He escorts foreign tourists through the glittering maze of Tokyo's red light district, helping them find the entertainments and services they seek. The novel tales place over a three-day span, December 29-31, 1996. Kenji's client is an American named Frank, a man of imposing size and strength and, Kenji soon realizes, some very frightening characteristics and mannerisms. After the first two stops on their first night--a bar and peep show--it is obvious to Kenji that Frank is not what he claims to be, and Kenji even begins to suspect that this American may have been the one responsible for the grisly murder of a prostitute the previous evening. Kenji's suspicious of Frank are, of course, well-founded, and we are soon in the midst of a grisly and suspenseful pshcyo-thriller. But from its second sentence on, it is also obvious that another purpose of the novel is to compare Japanese and American cultures. For example, Kenji observes: What's good about Americans, if I can generalize a little, is that they have a kind of openhearted innocence. And what's not so good is that they can't imagine any world outside the States, or any value system different from their own. The Japanese have a similar defect, but Americans are even worse about trying to force others to do whatever they themselves believe to be right. American clients often forbid me to smoke and sometimes even make me accompany them on their daily jogs. In a word, they're childish... Much later in the novel Frank mirrors this argument, in a way, as he is relating to Kenji what a Peruvian prostitute had just explained to Frank. Pointing out that Japan may have lost wars, but, like the U.S., has never been invaded and forced to assimilate another culture, she explains... ...so the people at home never came face to face with an enemy who killed and raped their relatives and forced them to speak a new language. A history of being assimilated is one thing most countries in Europe and the New World have in common, so it's like a basis for international understanding. But the people in this country don't know how to relate to outsiders because they haven't had any real contact with them. That's why they're so insular. Yet while Japan and the U.S. do have in common a certain degree of cultural smugness, albeit manifested in different ways, Kenji finds a number of sharp contrasts, including this observation: I remember the American making this particular confession, and the way his voice caught when he said "accept it." Americans don't talk about just grinning and bearing it, which is the Japanese approach to many things. After listening to a lot of these stories, I began to think that American loneliness is a completely different creature from anything we experience in this country, and it made me glad I was born Japanese. The type of loneliness where you need to keep struggling to accept a situation is fundamentally different from the sort you know you'll get through if you just hang in there. Loneliness is a theme Murakami returns to in describing the Tokyo sex trade. Most of the women working as prostitutes or participating in "compensated dating" are not in need of money, he claims, but simply lonely. Likewise most of their clients are not seeking sex as much as simple companionship, and an ever increasing number of them are willing to pay a prostitute just to have a long conversation fully clothed. Yet it is the American, Frank, and not the Japanese who is the central figure in the novel. He is a psychotic of immense, almost supernatural, power and ability. Yet he is also fully aware of his own condition and discusses its origins at length with Kenji. Presumably he is representative of the ills of society as a whole, Japanese as well as American. He is the product of a culture obsessed with materialism, where parents are so devoted to their careers that they neglect their families, where neighbors never meet one another, and where children are desensitized by a surfeit of artificial stimulation. Ending with a plea for cultural understanding and spiritual focus, In the Miso Soup is clearly meant to be a thoughtful novel and not just a crime thriller. Yet the novel's brevity doesn't allow for much development of the author's ideas, so it's not quite as satisfying or convincing as it might have been.
Both really good reviews - I might try In the Miso Soup. I'm sure it will make my skin crawl, but I'm not sure if it would be in a good way or a bad way.
Category 12: Comedy and Satire The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker by Tobias SmollettFirst published 1771.  Tobias Smollett’s last and greatest novel, The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker, is a both a satire and a travelogue. It is an epistolary novel with five letter-writers, all part of a family group that makes an eight-month tour of the island of Great Britain. Matthew Bramble, the leader of the expedition, is a gouty Welsh gentleman, a confirmed bachelor who admits to being a libertine in his youth, and something of a hypochondriac. His health is the reason for the trip, and the letters he writes are to his doctor, who is also his closest friend. Bramble is a bit of a misanthrope, or at least likes to appear to, but his innate humanity and generosity never fail to show through. “If the morals of mankind have not contracted an extraordinary degree of depravity, within these thirty years,” he writes, “then I must be infected with the common vice of old men.” Bramble’s sister, Tabitha, likewise never married, is a selfish, miserly spinster whose narrow-mindedness is always set in contrast to the broader views of her brother. Her nephew writes on one occasion that she “found new matter of offence; which, indeed, she has a particular genius for extracting at will from almost every incident in life.” She writes back to the family housekeeper constantly reminding her to keep the servants under control and not to lose count of the spoons. The most perceptive observer of the group is Bramble’s nephew, Jery Melford who reports with wry detachment on the family’s foibles to his friend back at Oxford. In London Jery associates with both literary and political circles, reporting in astonishment on the corruption and hypocrisy he finds in both. Jery’s younger sister Lydia enters the scene already stricken with love for a mysterious actor who calls himself “Wilson,” but who confesses this is neither his real name nor his true station in life. This Wilson will appear in various guises throughout the journey, sending the fragile Lydia into a faint and her protective brother into a raging fury. Lastly there is Tabitha’s young maid Winifred Jenkins, whose struggles with spelling in her letters to her friend back in Wales provide the novel's funniest moments. Of her visit to London she writes: “And I have seen the Park, and the paleass of Saint Gimses, and the king's and the queen's magisterial pursing, and the sweet young princes, and the hillyfents, and pye bald ass, and all the rest of the royal family.” She later asserts she is not given to “tailbaring,” and righteously proclaims “that by the new light of grease, I may deify the devil and all his works.” So who is Humphrey Clinker? He is a young man the family hire on the road between Bath and London to replace a dismissed footman. He’s so poor that the rags he wears don’t even properly cover his behind (bare buttocks, as you can see, are a recurrent gag in the novel). But Clinker, a devout Wesleyan, becomes the moral center of the group, and changes each of them the longer they are around him. As a travel narrative, the novel focuses on three locales: Bath, London, and Scotland. The first two are treated satirically, with the family members giving accounts contrasting as widely as their temperaments. To young Lydia they are sparkling jewels of social delight. To her uncle they are Sodom and Gomorrah. But the tone changes when the group reaches Scotland, the author’s native land. “The people at the other end of the island know as little of Scotland as of Japan,” Jery asserts, and Smollet sets out to rectify that ignorance with an extensive and loving description of urban and rural scenes, lowlands and highlands, and the people therein. Near the end of the novel there is this excellent observation: “Without all doubt, the greatest advantage acquired in travelling and perusing mankind in the original, is that of dispelling those shameful clouds that darken the faculties of the mind, preventing it from judging with candour and precision.” The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker is a warm and funny novel, and many of the author’s observations on politics, public health and human nature are as applicable today as they were in 1771. Anyone who likes the novels of Charles Dickens or the travel narratives of Mark Twain will find that this was their prototype.
Category 9: Incredible Worlds Green Mars by Kim Stanley RobinsonFirst published 1994   The first work of Robinson's Mars Trilogy, Red Mars, was an exciting story of discovery and survival that introduced the fascinating technical and philosophical issues surrounding the decision to terraform the red planet. In Green Mars the colonization of Mars is well established, the terraforming well under way, and the issues are social and political rather than technical (not that there isn't still an abundance of scientific information and debate presented to the reader). The key issue is Mars' relationship to Earth and the multi-national corporations which are now in charge. Is Mars to continue to be a colony whose mineral resources are siphoned off to meet the needs of the home planet, or is it to be an independent world building its own future? It is perhaps inevitable that the level of excitement in Red Mars cannot be sustained into the sequel. The important, and sometimes cataclysmic, events are now happening on Earth, to be learned of only second hand. And the vital issues are now not so much scientific as economic, a field in which the author seems less at home. In fact the economic basis for the massive effort involved in settling and terraforming Mars remains largely a mystery throughout the novel. So rather than a thrill ride into the unknown, Green Mars is a novel that invites sober reflection on the nature of economic imperialism and the perils of unregulated corporate capitalism. It also reflects, albeit from a vast distance, upon the dangers of population growth, economic stratification, and climate change. By means of dramatic medical advances, the author keeps the surviving characters from Red Mars around for several more decades so they continue to be the principal characters in Green Mars. They are not reintroduced, so it is advisable to read the two books as closely together as you can so you remember who's who. A peek ahead into Blue Mars reveals the same character names, so the entire trilogy is best treated as a three-volume novel.
Category 10: Horror and Mystery Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto EcoFirst published in Italian 1988 English translation by William Weaver 1989   Foucault’s Pendulum begins with the narrator, a man with the unlikely name of Casaubon, preparing to hide past closing time in a Paris museum. Here, at midnight, he expects to observe some sort of rite practiced by a secret and dangerous society. He also hopes to find a clue to the disappearance of his friend and mentor, Jacopo Belbo. We then go back a number of years to the point where Casaubon, then a graduate student in Milan, first meets Belbo, a publisher. Casaubon is working on a thesis about the Knights Templar, and it just so happens that Belbo has a meeting scheduled with a retired army officer who claims to have uncovered profound secrets about the Templars which he is ready to reveal to the public, not the least of which secrets is that the Templars are still in existence and poised to seize control of the world. Belbo and Casaubon interview the man, whose conspiratorial conjectures they are inclined to dismiss as whimsical until they learn that the officer was found dead in his hotel room that night, only to have his body mysteriously disappear by the following morning. Years elapse as Casaubon, Belbo, and a third friend named Diotallevi gradually explore the world of secret societies, eventually making it a specialty of Belbo’s publishing firm. The Templars, they find, are linked by some theorists to the Rosicrucians, and thence to the Freemasons. The circle of conspiracy broadens to include groups as diverse as the Druids and the Elders of Zion. Among the people implicated are Sir Francis Bacon, Napoleon, Voltaire, and the head of the Czar’s secret service. The artifacts of the conspiracy include the Pyramids, Stonehenge, the Holy Grail, the great Gothic cathedrals, and the Eifel Tower. Eventually it seems that half the elite of Europe are involved in guarding some great secret, but it appears that not even the guardians themselves know what the secret is. Connecting symbols, meanings and ideas across languages and cultures is an element of semiotics, the branch of learning pioneered by Umberto Eco. His characters follow clues across historical and literary trails, finding hidden meaning in seeming coincidences, decoding complex messages from isolated fragments, and seeing patterns in distant events. Like others before them, however, their findings are all too likely to conform to their expectations and desires. Finally, and to their peril, they lose the ability to distinguish their discoveries from their inventions. The seemingly endless litany of secret societies, obscure authorizes, and ancient texts can be mind-numbing at time, but this is a novel that fully rewards perseverance. The concluding chapters are not only very suspenseful, but we also find that the author’s exploration of how we evaluate meanings and associations has led us to much more philosophical observations on how we evaluate and find meaning in life itself.
Category 2: Families White Teeth by Zadie SmithFirst published 2000   On New Year's Day, 1975, Archie Jones attempts to kill himself. Archie is an ordinary London bloke, age 47, whose wife has just divorced him. A complete stranger foils Archie's clumsy attempt to gas himself, and Archie takes this to be the start of a new life. Indeed it is, for later that morning he meets Clara. Clara is the 19-year-old daughter of Jamaican immigrants who has just fled her parents' home for the first time because of her mother's oppressive religious zealotry (Jehova's Witness). Clara and Archie have nothing more in common than an urgent need for someone to cling to, and a few weeks later they are married. Archie's best (in fact his only) friend is Samad Iqbal, a Bengali Muslim from Bangladesh. The two were thrown together by chance in the waning days of World War II and renewed their friendship when Samad immigrated to England. Samad's long-awaited arranged marriage to a wife Clara's age occurs at about the same time as Archie's, and the two aging men soon become fathers in the cultural maelstrom that is late 20th century London. It is the children--Archie's daughter and Samad's twin sons--whose lives are the focus of the novel. They are caught between cultural, religious and social forces and react in often unpredictable ways. Another family then enters the picture, the Chalfens, the husband a brilliant but eccentric geneticist (and a lapsed Jew), the wife a middle-aged flower child (lapsed Roman Catholic) who compulsively mothers every child but her own. Eventually each child, including the Chalfens', winds up espousing a Cause diametrically opposed to the values of its parents. White Teeth appears in the beginning to be chiefly a light-hearted look at immigrant life in London, and indeed it is up to a point. But the principal theme of the novel is actually the one expressed in the book's epigraph, a quote by E. M. Forster: "There's never any knowing... which of our actions, which of our idlenesses won't have things hanging on it forever." This is highlighted by the indecisive Archie's using a flip of the coin to make all of his life's tough decisions. In the end, his method seems to be as good as any. I found the first half of the novel, which focused more on the cultural environment of London and the challenges facing immigrants and interracial couples, to be both rewarding and funny. White Teeth began to disappoint me, though, when it got away from these themes with the introduction of the Chalfens. The humor started turning into silliness and the novel seemed to be occurring on a sitcom stage rather than the real world. The author clearly shows us that our life's direction can be made up of seemingly random events, chance encounters, and unportentous choices, but where does that take us? We can only shrug in the face of the obvious and move on. It's still a good novel, and Smith's uninhibited writing style is superbly suited to her subject, but for me the story didn't live up in the end to the high expectations the opening chapters had generated. 188StevenTXEdited: Sep 22, 2012, 8:14pm
Category 5: Making It The Empty Book by Josefina VicensFirst published in Spanish 1958 English translation by David Lauer 1992   José García has two notebooks. The first is for his random daily thoughts, his notes, his experiences, his ideas. The second is for the draft of the novel he tells everyone he is writing. The second notebook is empty. García is a lower middle class accountant living somewhere in Mexico and barely supporting his wife and two sons. For reasons he can't explain or understand, he is compelled to write even though, as he freely admits, he doesn't know how, and he has nothing to say. The first notebook opens with a string of such self-recriminations. The more he writes, the deeper his guilt over having produced nothing of value. Often he has considered burning his notebooks, only to realize that the next thing he would do is buy a new notebook to record his feelings about having burned the previous one. But without having planned it, García begins to fill the first notebook with thoughts and reminiscences about his wife, his sons, an extramarital affair, his financial difficulties, and his job. Thinking about his wife, he observes that "it is only in the body of a person whom we have loved deeply for a long time that we don't perceive the passing of time, and that growing old with that person is a way of never growing old. Seeing someone from day to day has a slow, compassionate rhythm." When his grown son falls in love with an older woman, García despairs of giving him guidance: Maybe he's right. He feels I can't understand it. He considers my fifty-six years capable of conserving the memory of a twenty-year-old's love but not its richness. He feels that I keep the whole experience inside me, compact, sort of petrified, but that I can no longer separate and give the emotions their exact value that love aroused, that I no longer understand tears, hope, desire, or the absolute truth that the world begins in the head of a woman and ends at her feet. There are no other surroundings, there is no other horizon. She, she alone with her small boundaries that contain everything....
Don't pay any attention to my advice; experience lies at the end of the road, and I shouldn't deprive you of either the pleasure of the road or the sad wealth you'll find when you come to its end. Because that's what experience is: a sad wealth that shows you only how you should have lived but not how to live again. And most poignantly, García speaks of the common man's sense of hope and the future. We are always wanting time to hurry by so that we can see our dreams materialize. We look forward to watching our children grow, to gaining the next promotion, to paying off our debts, and to putting a bad experience behind us. "And so," he concludes, "hoping that time will pass so that the daily problems that weigh us down will also pass, we find one day that our own time has passed." José García's empty notebook stands for the unrealized dreams of all of us who will never be heroes or celebrities. The Empty Book is a beautiful and moving expression of both the shattered hopes and the hidden richness of a common life, and of the nature of memory and experience. It was also, in 1958, the first work of metafiction by a Mexican author. José García writes about writing. When a close friend is put on trial for embezzling money to pay medical bills, García confesses, "So there were moments when I experienced both sorrow because of the event and enthusiasm for the possibility of describing it, and felt both with equal passion." It is amazing that a novel this good, this readable, and of such importance in the Latin American literary tradition should now be so obscure. But Josefina Vicens was a modest woman, always writing under masculine pen names, who refused to promote her own work. Her gender and political views probably played a role as well in keeping The Empty Book from a wider readership. If you can find a copy, I highly recommend it. 189cammykittyEdited: Sep 23, 2012, 2:27pm
Great review of The Empty Book. I've had pretty good luck finding things through interlibrary loan. It's already on the WL. Although I'm a little afraid I may recognize myself in it.
The Empty Book looks good! Sadly not available at my local library but adding it to the list of books to keep my eye out for.
Category 10: Horror and Mystery Audition by Ryu MurakamiFirst published in Japanese 2009* English translation by Ralph McCarthy 2009   Aoyama, a Tokyo filmmaker, has been a widower for seven years. His teenage son Shige eventually asks him "Why don't you find yourself a new wife, Pops?" Aoyama, realizing that he has been avoiding female company for his son's sake, warms up to the idea, but at age 42 he has no idea how to go about it. His best friend suggests that he do what comes naturally to a filmmaker: hold an audition. So they concoct a fake film project and advertise for a leading lady with the special qualities Aoyama desires. Right from the first interview, Aoyama realizes that Yamasaki Asami is the woman he is looking for. He barrels into a relationship, ignoring his friend's warning that there are signs this beautiful young woman isn't what she claims to be. The plot of this thriller is simple and predictable. When it comes to scenes of sex, terror and violence, Murakami is at his best, but the rather shaky premise and hastily developed characters make Audition the weakest of the author's novels in English translation. Other works I have read by Ryu Murakami: Almost Transparent BlueCoin Locker BabiesSixty-ninePopular Hits of the Showa EraPiercingIn the Miso SoupCover design: The film poster (top right) is a much better representation than the cartoonish image chosen by the publisher. *Wikipedia says 1997, but Author's copyright in the book itself says 2009.
#189 - Cammykitty, I saw on the book page that you had it in your library (the only connection of mine to do so), but I guess that means it was in your wishlist. I learned of this novel from an online friend in Mexico, and would otherwise never of heard of it. How did it come to your attention?
193psuttoSep 24, 2012, 7:23am
I saw the film of Audition at a film festival several years ago without knowing too much about it, obviously the people who walked out of the cinema during a certain scene knew very little about it too....
Audition is not my favourite of his books either. Haven't got around to watching the film yet though.
Steven, I think you recommended it to me because I was looking for Mexican authors, especially female. Shoot, Audition sounded like a good premise. I haven't read Ryu Murakami yet and was hoping that might be a place to start, especially since as a female, I would do damage to any guy who set up a fake project to find/date me. I like novels where the protagonist is a bit hateful too. Pete - now you've made me curious about the film. So it's got quite a horror moment in it, you're saying ??? Or an OMG I'm so embarrassed to be here with my girlfriend moment? 196psuttoSep 25, 2012, 4:28am
there may be a embarrassed to be here with my girlfriend moment in there somewhere but I was definitely thinking of a horror moment...
Steven, I think you recommended it to me because I was looking for Mexican authors, especially female. Duh! Well then, I heartily second my own recommendation. :-} I'm actually not sure if Audition the book came before or after the film. The simplicity of the plot suggests the latter. Two of Murakami's other novels, Piercing and Popular Hits of the Showa Era, feature vengeful females and are both, in my opinion at least, a bit better than Audition. On the other hand, his best-known (and probably best) novel, Almost Transparent Blue, is one in which women are principally sex objects--but that's the point he is making about modern culture.
Category 10: Horror and Mystery The Damned (Là-Bas) by Joris-Karl HuysmansFirst published in French 1891 English translation Terry Hale 2001   The end of the 19th century was a time when science had battered the foundations of orthodox religion, but could not yet dispel many notions of the supernatural. Spiritualism became an upper class fad, and there was a renewed interest in the darker forms of occultism. Là-Bas both represents and depicts this period of exploring the fringes of the supernatural. The novel opens with its principle character, a writer named Durtal, having one of many discussions with his friend Hermies, a physician. They are criticizing Naturalism, the literary movement led by Émile Zola. What Durtal finds objectionable is not "the language of the lockup, the doss house and the latrines," but the fact that it "promotes the idea of art as something democratic" and denies the "higher levels of existence." Durtal announces that he is commencing a writing project that will address the spiritual as well as the material. It is to be a biography of Gilles de Rais, a 15th century military leader, occultist, and serial killer. Throughout the novel, Huysmans interweaves the biographical details of Gilles de Rais with the story of Durtal and his friends. Once a celebrated general under Joan of Arc, Gilles retired to his baronial estates in Brittany where he began dabbling in alchemy. This led to the practice of celebrating the Black Mass, a ceremony meant in this case to invoke Satan's aid in converting lead to gold. But the Black Mass, as Gilles practiced it, required the blood of a freshly slain child. This soon became a sexual fetish for the baron, who became one of history's most notorious child killers. From Hermies, Durtal learns that there are people practicing the black arts even in his own time. In various dinner table conversations--much of the novel consists of dinner table conversations--Durtal learns about contemporary practitioners of astrology, exorcism, spiritual poisoning, and other rites. He is most fascinated by the Black Mass, however, and eventually gets his chance to observe one with the aid of a mysterious and anonymous female admirer. The views of Durtal and his friends reflect the author Huysmans's increasing conservatism and orthodoxy. There is a nostalgia for the Middle Ages, a time when the "plebs" knew their place and accepted their lot in life--in contrast to the Paris "rabble" whom Hermies describes as "avaricious, abject and stupid." Most tellingly, Satan is depicted as a Socialist revolutionary in this invocation: "Thou art the champion of the poor, and the staff of the vanquished! Endow them with hypocrisy, ingratitude and pride, that they may defend themselves against the Children of God, the rich and wealthy!" The author's elitism may be as repugnant to some as the Gilles de Rais's murders, but that doesn't keep Là-Bas from being a fascinating and entertaining novel. The discussion of the dark arts is highly informative but kept light enough--would you be so kind as to pass the creamed peas--by the interjection of small talk to avoid becoming a lecture. While it's rather light on plot, there is enough graphic sex and violence in Là-Bas to make it controversial at the time in France and unpublishable elsewhere. It is very much worth reading for the light it sheds into the darker corners of history and its insight into the intellectual currents of the fin de siècle.
The Damned is going on the WL, and would you third your rec of The Empty Book? As for Popular Hits, I'm tempted just because of the rock, paper, scissors. 200StevenTXEdited: Oct 4, 2012, 9:15pm
Category 5: Making It Turbulence by Jia PingwaFirst published in Chinese 1987 English translation by Howard Goldblatt 1991   Turbulence takes place in rural China during the post-Mao years. The title stands for the economic and political turmoil of the time. It also refers to the dangerous waters of the Zhou River, the setting for most of the book. And it represents the confused emotions of its principal characters, Golden Dog and Water Girl. Golden Dog is the son of a simple sign painter in a little village known as Stream of Wandering Spirits. A stint in the army has given him an awareness of the outside world and taught him how to express himself in writing, but he begins his career as many local men do: poling a raft taking small cargoes from the mountain villages down the river to market. Water Girl is an orphan who lives with her uncle Han Wenju, the local ferryman. She and Golden Dog have grown up almost as close as brother and sister, so they are very awkward about the affections they feel for one another. Unable to understand, much less express, his love for Water Girl, Golden Dog is easy prey for the seductive wiles of Yingying, the step-daughter of a local official. "Water Girl was a bodhisattva, Yingying was a wild animal. People revere bodhisattvas, but they fall in love with wild animals; the holiness of the bodhisattva had steered him clear of wicked thoughts, but the seductiveness of the wild animal had forced him into a quagmire from which there was no escape." Ironically, Golden Dog does escape from the quagmire, at least temporarily: His application for a job as a newspaper reporter is accepted, and he is whisked off to Zhou City, leaving Water Girl hurt and Yingying frustrated. In the city, Golden Dog learns the harsh political realities that dominate this socialist country struggling to implement capitalism. And he learns that no one exposes corruption without himself becoming the target of retribution. Jia portrays a China still steeped in ancient traditions and beliefs, overlaid with the teachings of communism and the bitter experience of the Cultural Revolution, and now struggling to implement reforms that few fully understand. Feudal structures remain in the form of clans which dominate local party offices. Bribery is an indispensable part of any business enterprise. But Jia sees China's problem as something even deeper, for "no sooner do some people set themselves up in business than they're rolling in money, and most of the new wealth has come through business practices that would give you the creeps." He sees "serious graft and corruption, and a deterioration of public morality the result." The author blames this loss of public morality on the character of the Chinese people. "After a major upheaval, changes in social attitude invariably occur: the people grow agitated, begin to lose their sense of public morality, shun discipline, and grow more complacent about violence." And further: "Our race is beset by an inherent failing, that of invariably transforming normal enthusiasm into abnormal stimulation, and of turning confidence into irrational fanaticism." Turbulence is a memorable portrayal of a land of changes and contrasts, where a semi-literate peasant can become a millionaire almost overnight through pure speculation. The people are wrenched from their traditional occupations by the temptation to follow get-rich-quick schemes. A mountain is deforested for the making of walking sticks that are soon nothing but firewood. A fad for pig raising results in such overproduction that the swine are soon worth less than the grain they consume in a single day. And the great river, as treacherous and unpredictable as history itself, is always there to remind the villagers that all gain is fleeting. The love story of Water Girl and Golden Dog takes a back seat to the author's portrayal of a nation in a period of difficult transition as China struggles to achieve socialist ends through capitalist means. Turbulence is a slow-paced novel that provides valuable insight but requires some patience on the reader's part, so I would recommend it most to those with a particular interest in recent Chinese history.
I will continue to keep track of this challenge (though my chances of completing it are pretty much nil), but starting today I'm posting reviews on my new 2013 challenge thread.
Good review of Turbulence. Glad you've moved over to 2013. I was about to tell you to start a new thread because this one loads too slowly. |  309 members 33,502 messages  AboutThis topic is not marked as primarily about any work, author or other topic. Touchstones |
.jpg!Blog.jpg)
