Books dcozy Read in 2011

That Patrick Leigh Fermor can write is no surprise. What was unexpected was that Deborah Devonshire, her affectation of illiteracy notwithstanding, also knows how to turn a phrase. The letters that make up In Tearing Haste are uniformly lively, Fermor's arriving from far-flung regions including his home in Greece, devonshiredeborahmit::Devonshire's mostly from her estate or not far from it. Letters such as these make perfect light reading, nice as one is drifting toward nod. They also make one want to turn again to Fermor's travel books, and to wish that the long awaited third volume of his trilogy might, at last, see the light of day. He is, after all, ninety-five years old, so he doesn't have much longer to procrastinate.

The most interesting thing about Ryuhoku Narushima, author of the New Chronicles of Yanagibashi and Diary of a Journey to the West is how much this mid-19th century scholar, journalist, traveler, and writer got up to. The two books collected in this volume hint at his breadth. The first, New Chronicles of Yanagibashi, deals with life in the "flower and willow world" of Meiji Tokyo, and Matthew Fraleigh's reminder that "to imply, as some have in their zeal to counter patronizing or prurient misconceptions, that the single-minded pursuit of the arts has always been the reason that Japanese women became geisha, that stories of women sold into indentured servitude are 'urban legends,' and that any association of the historical geisha with sexual labor springs solely from Western biases or misunderstandings, is simply untenable." The second book is a record of a trip Narushima made to Europe and North America in the early 1870s, and is illuminating on what it was like to be one of the few Japanese abroad in those days who was not part of an official mission.

Welcome back!

Sounds like fascinating reading.

I'm looking forward to following your reading again this year!

Thanks, all, for the warm welcome back into the fold.

Looking forward to another year of good reading.

Glad to see you back with us again, David!

Patrick Leigh Fermor is one of those authors I hope to be able to read some day. I have several of his books in the BlackHole already. Too bad my local library does not carry any of them.

Wendy Walker's The Secret Service is a latter-day gothic novel made more interesting than many of its progenitors by the quality, sentence for sentence, of Walker's writing. Her elegant prose is in service of a story about an English secret service whose members can assume other forms—goblets, roses, privet hedges—in order to infiltrate enemies' strongholds, strongholds that, in the best gothic tradition, are replete with secret passages, garden mazes, and towers that imprison missing princesses. All of this allows Walker to meditate fruitfully on the boundaries between the human and the not-human, boundaries we like to believe are immutable. The center section, in which one of the agents is trapped between object and human, is a tour-de-force, but so powerful (and long) is it that it overbalances, to some extent, the story that surrounds it, but it is in itself such a pleasure that one doesn't mind. It is wrong that book of this quality should be out-of-print.

#8: It is wrong that book of this quality should be out-of-print.

And terrible that my local libraries do not have a copy of it either. Sounds terrific! Thanks for the recommendation, David.

Lydia Davis has been getting a lot of attention lately for her translations, and especially for her short stories. Both of those endeavors are, I am certain, worthy of attention (I believe this not least because readers I trust tell me that such is the case). Contrarian that I am, however, I decided to make my first serious foray into Davis's work by way of her novel, The End of the Story, and it has, to say the least, got me very excited about moving onto the short fiction. The End of the Story is the story of a relationship chronicled from end to beginning—the story of the chronicling of a relationship from end to beginning—and is told in fragments. Each of these shards is carefully chosen and carefully placed, and each sentence of each section is artfully crafted. This is a masterpiece; why, one wonders, is it so little known.

#10: *sigh* Another one of your recommendations that my local library does not have.

Kage Baker's Company series of novels are superb in every way, and the second, Sky Coyote, is no exception. As she has pointed out, she takes pains to get the history her time-traveling immortals experience right, and the social commentary—about old times and future times that resonate with our times—is always spot on, and often laugh-out-loud funny. She extrapolates from current trends to give us mortals that force her immortals to throw up their hands:

"What are these people? They don't watch their own movies, haven't read their own books, they don't listen to their own music, their art embarrasses them, and as far as I can tell they're afraid of one another. They stay in their rooms playing games."

Not exactly far-fetched, is it?

I ordered the next two in the series today.

The only thing wrong with the first volume of Lars Martinson's saga of the English-teaching life in rural Japan, Tonoharu was that it ended too abruptly, just as the story was beginning to get good. In Tonoharu: Part Two the art remains exquisite, and would by itself be worth the price of admission, as would the Japanese scenes Martinson captures with that art--scenes that any resident will recognize, but may confuse those who spend too much time with tourist brochures or Beautiful Japan coffee table books. The plot has thickened a bit, and the protagonist is marginally less of a sad-sack than he had been. One begins to see how great an achievement Tonoharu will be when all four volumes are completed.

In Capital, Maureen Duffy, a prolific author new to me, weaves with consummate skill the whole of English history into a narrative featuring a London squatter called Meepers. He is a self taught stones-and-bones man who feels the dead under the streets he walks, and is on a mission to keep London's long history from grinding to a halt. The novel is illuminated by a tenderness for the city, and not besmirched by nostalgia for some quaint old place that never existed. I look forward to Wounds and Londoners, the two Duffy novels that form, with this one, a trilogy. This book will delight lovers of Iain Sinclair, and of Michael Moorcock's Mother London.

#12: You remind me that I have that one on my shelf somewhere yet to read. I will have to track it down.

#14: The Duffy books sound interesting. I will have to see if my local library carries any of them.

Hi There

I'm compiling a list of birthdays of our group members. If you haven't done so already, would you mind stopping by this thread and posting yours.

Thanks.

http://www.librarything.com/topic/105833

Having lovedJane Gardam's Old Filth, I was somewhat disappointed to only like The Queen of the Tambourine. It's a good portrait of a delusional woman, and sketch of some of the aspects of her society that might have made her the way she is. The skill with which this is done, however, is undercut in the end when she gets better simply by allowing herself to recognize the dark cloud that has hung over her marriage—a cloud most readers will have detected much earlier than poor deluded Eliza. The book brims, however, with the sorts of witty portraits at which Gardam excels, and for them it was worth a read.

I've read the first three of Kage Baker's Company novels, and Mendoza in Hollywood one is far and away the least satisfying. Baker seems to have forgotten, or placed to one side, the skill at plotting and the wit that was so evident and abundant in the first two volumes in favor of a long—say two-thirds of the book—bout of throat clearing at the beginning, and then a lot of info-dump exposition at the end. Still, the first two in the series were good enough that I probably will, at some point, continue with the series. (Side note: it's probably a good idea to insist that blurb writers actually, you know, read the novels they are meant to be summarizing. At no point does Mendoza, as is asserted on the back cover, spend "a period of time in early twentieth-century Hollywood during the days of D.W. Griffith.")

#18: The blurb writers and cover artists seem to ignore the content of the book. I read a book where the heroine was described as a gorgeous redhead and the cover of the book showed a blonde.

"Academia wore Peirce / out long before / the massive literature / of Pierciana." So writes Susan Howe of the polymathic philosopher, Charles S. Pierce. The academics' failure, she suggests in this poem-essay, lies in their ignorance of the original manuscripts, tens of thousands of pages—or their electronic facsimilies—that lie buried in Harvard's libraries. She resurrects Pierce, and uses him as a locus to which diverse others—Thomas Love Peacock, George Meredith, Achilles, Tristan, Dickens, Sterne . . . —are connected, and suggests that, even having combed through some portion of the manuscripts, Howe, and in turn her readers, cannot grasp the man, the world, the words. This study of how incomplete versions of people are all that survive, in scraps, memories, portraits, and scribblings, is worthy of thought, study, and rereading.

#19: Too, publishers seem, in the worst sense, to be color-blind.

http://mobile.salon.com/mwt/broadsheet/feature/2010/01/19/cover_whitewashing/ind...

#21: Ridiculous. Like the reading public is not going to figure out that the book is about a person of color by reading it.

Jim Shepard's Master of Miniatures is a masterful miniature, a small container filled with substantial events and substantial pleasures. Based on the life of Eiji Tsuburaya, the special effects man who made it possible for us to enjoy Godzilla destroying Tokyo, this is a story of that destruction, the seismic destruction of Tokyo in 1923, the wartime aerial destruction of Tokyo, and also the destruction that those catastrophes wreak on Tsuburaya's life and marriage. Shepard is a masterful stylist, whose prose is a pleasure to parse, and he gets bonus points for (unlike most non-Japanese who write about the place) getting even small details of Japanese right.

The first in Michael Moorcock's Pyat Quartet, Byzantium Endures is the story of Maxim Arturovitch Pyatnitsk which, Moorcock tells us, he heard from Pyat's own lips. Pyat (as he is called) is a despicable character, not least because he is never honest about his moral failings: as a narrator he is unreliable to a fault. Born on the first day of the twentieth century we follow the Zelig-like Pyat, in this first volume, through the Russian revolution and its aftermath. It is a very English, and very enjoyable, picaresque Russian novel.

Frost in May by Antonia White is a chilling portrayal, exquisitely written, of life at a convent school, an authoritarian regime of the sort that Catholics are so singularly gifted at creating and administering.

We have escaped, in Antonia White's second novel, The Lost Traveller, (it's the first of a trilogy) from the claustrophobic convent and out into the world. The young woman at the novel's center, now called Clara, but clearly the same person as Nanda in Frost in May, moves in a bigger world, and so does the novelist by shifting beyond the consciousness of the young woman to that of her parents, aunts, and others. White's ability to observe, or--the novels are very close to her life--remember, and then to render her observations and memories, is remarkable. I look forward to continuing with the trilogy in The Sugar House.

I love Antonia White's quartet, always good to see a new convert.

Clara is in The Sugar House, in a company touring provincial England. Archie, whose marriage proposal she had declined, tracks her down, and when the man she believes herself to be in love with betrays her, she allows herself to enter into a loveless—from her side—marriage with the man whose proposal she had once declined. The novel is largely a recounting of the way a marriage, built on the shakiest of foundations, goes bad, and is as brilliantly written and observed as Antonia White's earlier work.

The last in what I suppose might be called The Frost in May cycle, Beyond the Glass is also the most brilliant. White charts, in this novel, the protagonist's decline into madness, and also the response of the people around her to the decline. It is all spot on, and it is all harrowing. That Antonia White, who suffered intermittently from mental illness herself, was able to write with such cold precision about Clara's affliction can only inspire awe.

Kate Atkinson's Case Histories is satisfying because there's enough else going on—wit, humor, and finely drawn characters—that we don't mind that, atypically for a mystery, we don't care much about who done it, and that when we find out who done it, the the malefactors—and at least some of them really are bad guys—are allowed to continue on their way without suffering retribution. The cynical humanism of her detective, Jackson Brodie, is winning.

Because they introduce English readers to writers we otherwise wouldn't know Kurodahan's collections of science fiction and—an overlapping and slightly broader category—speculative fiction are extremely valuable. Even more important, though, they're a heck of a lot of fun. In this most recent offering, Speculative Japan 2 there's something for everyone: scientific science fiction, fabulous fables, fantastic fantasy. It's hard to imagine a reader who will like everything here, impossible to imagine one who won't find something to relish.

All too often we read books that take positions we already agree with. There's nothing wrong with that. It's nice, sometimes, to hear one's convictions explained elegantly and eloquently, and perhaps to learn about new evidence in support of those positions. Other times we read books about this or that field about which we have no position. We just want to learn more, and that's okay, too. Other times, however, we read a book about something we care passionately about—we all ought to care about Stewart Brand's concerns in Whole Earth Discipline, the health of the earth and the flourishing of humanity—and that book makes us radically reconsider all our positions. I agreed with Brand going in about the desirability, from a green perspective among many others, of dense cities. Given what we now know about climate change, I had been opening my mind to the necessity of nuclear power, and Brand convinced me, even in the aftermath of Fukushima, that the necessity is there, and also the possibility of doing it in ways that, if not entirely risk-free, are safer and more ecologically sound than, for example, the burning of coal, from which the world currently gets most of its energy. I have done a full 180 on transgenic engineering and now agree with Brand that first-world Greens, in their opposition to GE foods, are responsible for many unnecessary deaths in the third world. In short, Brand has shaken up my world view, and that's always good fun. Now, to get on-line and see what some of his opponents have to say . . . .

I read only Frost in May of Antonia White's quartet. I must see if the local library has the rest of the series. Thanks for the reminder about the books, David.

Orientalism, that essentializing exoticization of the East is, we all know, a deplorable thing—but those of us who have been drawn to Asia know something else, too. We know that it was often the crudest of Western representations of Asia and Asians—the Chinese restaurant with the cheesy decor and outlandish dishes (compared to mom's meatloaf) such as chop suey, the Chinatown in which that restaurant was located—that sparked our interest. Interestingly, this sort of kitsch can also intrigue other Asians. Thus the Japanese have long enjoyed tales of China, a big brother seen by some Japanese as more Asian than the archipelago, and thus a likely site for wise sages, recondite philosophy, and, of course, the odd dragon. Though we can only speculate as to Atsushi Nakajima's reasons for choosing to set the stories in The Moon Over the Mountain in ancient China, it's hard to imagine that this sort of orientalism didn't play into it. Those not absolutely adverse to that view of Asia, or who are willing to excuse it when it's one oriental (as Asians used to be called) to another, will enjoy Nakajima's take on the mystic East.

#34: Well, as my local library does not have the book, I guess I will not be finding out if I like the kitsch or not.

>32 dcozy: There was an article in this morning's SF Chronicle which stated that energy from wind and tide may have their own effects on world weather. I think we should just concentrate on trying to reduce the amount of energy we use rather than find new ways to feed our needs.

In William Gibson's Zero History the MacGuffin is a pair of jeans. That fact--because who really cares about jeans?--illustrates how, though his books always have lively plots, the forward motion of his narratives is really just something on which to hang observations, turns of phrase, interesting characters, and other bits of arcana from the author's well-stocked mind. Raymond Chandler's masterpieces were primarily about the sensibility of his protagonist rather than the scrapes his protagonist got into, and Gibson's books are just the same. Assuming Zero History is to be the final volume, I will miss the world Gibson created in the Bigend trilogy and look forward to what he will get up to next.

The biggest attraction of The Furies, Janet Hobhouse's account of growing up poor in New York City, and how, from those humble beginnings, she got herself to Oxford, and made herself a writer is the prose. It's nice to read such frankly exuberant writing from a time and place when a more austere mode was preferred. Oddly, her mother's suicide, which, one assumes, was intended to be one of the book's central events, makes for the most skim-worth reading: other people's grief, it may be, is just not that interesting. I'll place it on the shelf next to Alix Roubaud's journals.

Karen Tei Yamashita's I Hotel is a fantasia on Asian-American left-wing politics during the decade beginning in 1968 and mostly centered on San Francisco and the Bay Area. It is in some ways fantastic, but it is a fantasy with deep roots in reality, the reality of the sacrifices and struggles of a generation of Asians in and around San Francisco's International Hotel, on what was once known as the Red Block of San Francisco's Kearny Street. Because these activists and the people on whose behalf the activists were militating were not always working in concert, and because their stories were not one story, Yamashita has given her novel the form of ten occasionally overlapping novellas rendered in a variety of forms. Some work better than others, but Yamashita's formal inventiveness, and the social and political awareness that infuses the novel, saves it from being another tedious and provincial Amy Tan-style ethnic fiction.

Robert Stone says Tapping the Source is "the all-time great surfing novel," and because I've never read (or even heard of) any other surfing novels I'll have to take him at his word. (I did read, and seem to remember enjoying years ago, Daniel Duane's surfing memoir.). Kem Nunn's novel is a competently written noir, interesting because—until we remember how many of the mean streets down which Marlowe walked lead through Southern California beach towns—a Southrn California beach town seems an unlikely setting for a noir thriller. The Huntington Beach Nunn gives us is compellingly seedy, the "fun, fun, fun" a distant memory. The plot is less convincing: devil worshippers and human sacrifice come into it. It's tiresome, too, to see that a disproportionate number of the baddies are gay or brown. That's barely forgivable in Chandler, less so in a writer of our own time. This was Nunn's first book, and there is potential. If I stumble across another I might give it a go.

I've read in Baudelaire's Flowers of Evil for years, but this is the first time I've sat down and read it, and its pendants, from cover to cover. Many of its component poems are, of course, masterpieces even taken in isolation, but the cumulative effect of the work as a whole makes for a powerful reading experience. James McGowan's translations seem to me good. Intelligently opting, in most cases, for iambic pentameter rather than Baudelaire's alexandrines, he makes the rhythms and rhymes work in English.

The second volume of a trilogy tends, they say, to sag, and that seems to be the case even with a trilogy as loosely linked as David Peace's Tokyo triad. Occupied City, which follows Tokyo Year Zero, takes off from a notorious Tokyo massacre, the poisoning of several bank employees in 1948. One of the most admirable things about Peace is his willingness to depart from the only slightly tarted up plain style that is the literary norm, his willingness to be stylistically adventurous. A ripe style (or several ripe styles in this case) can be a wonderful thing. It can also be tiresome as, for example, in this novel where Peace's attempt at incantatory repetition becomes merely dull repetitiousness. Style aside, though, Peace has a good eye for a suitable subject: the Teigin massacre is a fascinating lens through which to view Japan and the world. The disappointment I felt with the novel will probably have worn off by the time the third entry in the series hits paperback.

I recently discovered David Peace. After reading The Red Riding Hood Quartet in one gulp, I went on to the Tokyo novels. I have to admit that I found the style in which he wrote Tokyo Year Zero almost unreadable. I was very disappointed, but it sounds like you enjoyed that one better than the second, Occupied City. I almost didn't read Occupied City after Tokyo Year Zero, but I am glad I did. Has the third volume been published? I'll definitely read it.

You live in Japan, don't you? It must make the novels especially interesting.

I just remarked to my wife, after finishing Occupied City, that I must have become a local, because I knew pretty much every place mentioned in the book.

I think the new one's due out this year.

John Berger has noted that it is no longer possible to tell straight stories, and this difficulty makes the essay, for many writers (Berger among them), attractive. When the topic is as capacious as loss, losing, and getting lost, Rebecca Solnit's themes in A Field Guide to Getting Lost, the essay is particularly apt, and Solnit makes the form sing. One learns, certainly, from the information with which her book is packed, but one learns as much from seeing that yes, Yves Klein, tortoises, punk, and Death Valley do belong in the same book, and it's the sparks Solnit's subjects produce when rubbed together that make these essays art.

Happy Birthday, Turk is a competent crime novel in which the wise-cracking Turkish detective is very much in the tradition of Philip Marlowe (though he's not as witty, and more given to using his fists than Chandler's man). Also, unlike Marlowe, a white male, Kemal Kayankaya, a Turk in Germany, is an outsider in Frankfurt (reputed to be that country's ugliest city). This gives his take on thinks a certain freshness (though the author, Jakob Arjouni, is not a Turk himself). Worth a read, and I imagine, as I've subscribed to the Melville International Crime series, that I'll get to the rest in the series by and by.

Reading "Visuals," the first section of Otherwise Known as the Human Condition, Geoff Dyer's collection of essays and reviews, I enjoyed the essays there so much that I noticed again that reading good writing about photography is often as much fun as actually looking at photographs. Reading the second section, literary criticism, I remembered how fun non-academic criticism can be, and how someone who writes as nimbly as Dyer can re-interest me in writers like D. H. Lawrence and F. Scott Fitzgerald who I haven't wanted to read in years. A pleasurable slide through the section of pieces on music—the essay on Def Leppard, in whom I have less interest than I do in Lawrence, is a highlight—I got to the section that I was certain would be skim-worthy. An essay on flying a MIG? Fashion week in Paris? What could be duller—except, that is, when Dyer's writing about them. And having gobbled one's way through these bonbons, one arrives at the section called "Personals," and delights in learning more about the man and the mind ample enough to give us this much pleasure. Geoff Dyer just might be our most gifted essayist. We can only look forward to more gifts.

I very much enjoy essays, so I will be looking for those of Geoff Dyer. Thank you for the recommendation!

I have read very few essay collections--never seemed to interest me. It looks like Dyer's collection is the place to start!

Thanks to the Canadian publisher Drawn & Quarterly I've had the privilege of reading several volumes of gekiga, a sort of underground cartooning from Japan created, most notably, by Yoshihiro Tatsumi. Oji Suzuki's A Single Match is the latest example to come my way, and it is also the most mysterious. Far from the gritty worlds that characterize the work of Tatsumi's I've read, Suzuki seems more concerned with dreams, and thus his comics sometimes make as much—and as little—sense as dreams, and are as fragmentary as memory. Perhaps for that reason, his stories are as compelling as dreams and memory so often are. A frustrating, fascinating read.

James Campbell's This is the Beat Generation is a good, if perhaps excessively East Coast-centric, overview of the beats. The New York bias means that Gary Snyder, far and away the most impressive of the bunch, gets slighted, though one applauds Campbell's recognition of William Burroughs as the most original of the East Coasters, and perhaps of the whole gang. Campbell's style, too, is attractive. He opts to write interestingly rather than pedantically and never quite falls into the trap of parodying in his own prose the artists about whom he's writing.

Henning Mankell's Sidetracked, after a disappointing last outing in the series, is a return to form. My hypothesis, that the Wallander novels' quality declines the farther the detective gets from Sweden, was born out. In Sidetracked the only foreign affair is an uneventful meal at a Copenhagen restaurant; the rest of the book takes place in provincial Sweden and this, I think accounts in part for the book's success: it is, perhaps, the best of the lot. Re-enthused about the series, I look forward to the next one.

I still have not read the first Mankell book!

This is a travel book which makes good use of the travel writer's freedom to move from place to place, from place to past, from past to present to history to art to book. If this sort of discursive rambling delights you—and in Rachel Polonsky's Molotov's Magic Lantern it's mostly delightful—then this is the book for you, and the author's capaciousness seems entirely appropriate to its subject: the behemoth that is Russia, its culture and history. Be warned, though. Reading this book is sure to send one back to one's Mandelstam, Achmatova, et al.

#54: I will look for that one. Thanks, David.

Geoff Dyer has noted that, thus far, the best accounts of the ongoing wars in the Middle East are non-fiction, while the most successful accounts of World War II (from the allied side) are novels. With the publication of Shigeru Mizuki's autobiographical work recounting his service in New Guinea during World War II, one sees that another form will have to be taken into account: comics. Brilliantly drawn and told, Mizuki's Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths gives those of us fortunate enough never to have experienced anything like such horror a powerful draught of the pain and futility of war.

#56: Another excellent recommendation from you. Thanks!

Sea of Poppies is the model of what a historical novel should be. Unlike some authors working in this popular sub-genre, Amitav Ghosh, while he certainly gets the little details right, doesn't make his presentation of odd historical tidbits the driving force of the novel. Instead, he gives us a novel that is a cracking good read at the same time that it is a searing examination and indictment of globalization which, he reminds us, isn't exactly a new phenomenon: think opium and slaves, India and China, the US and England. I await, with bated breath, the next two books in the series.

The best thing about Beat Poets, edited by Carmela Ciuraru is that it reminds us of beats and near-beats who are now less remembered than the canonical few. I was happy to discover or rediscover poets like Marie Ponsot, Barbara Guest, and Denise Levertov (so much for poor old Kerouac's description of what the Beats were doing as "the pure masculine urge to freely sing"), and to be reminded that Gregory Corso was more—a lot more—than a loud and irritating drunk. The selection of the poems is often odd—none of Gary Snyder's best, for example, and only part of "Howl"—and there is no attempt to provide readers with even the barest details of when the poems were written or who the poets were (something one might be forgiven for expecting in a book called not "Beat Poetry" but "Beat Poets"). The Beat Book is a better, more richly contextualized, and less idiosyncratic collection.

>58 dcozy: I ordered a copy of River of Smoke, the second book in Ghosh's Ibis Trilogy, from The Book Depository, and I'll read it later this month.

kidzdoc: I'm wondering if I can hold out for the paperback . . . .

The latest in my traversal of Kage Baker's Company novels, The Graveyard Game was better than that last one I read, but does not quite equal the fizzy, witty bang with which the series began. That's not to say the book is devoid of wit, though. Especially good were the japes to do with a 23rd century in which meat, alcohol, and of course tobacco, have long been banned in most developed countries. Exercise, of course, is mandatory.

Focusing on the years after the Russo-Japanese war, and on the years after the 1923 earthquake, Alisa Freedman, drawing on a variety of sources that have thusfar been more or less ignored, elucidates, in Tokyo in Transit, the importance that "rails and road" have played in the development of the Japanese capital, and also of the modern denizens of that metropolis. That new and expanded transportation modes and networks are inextricably related with modernity is a commonplace, but it's nice to learn how that has played out in the Japanese context.

#60: I did not realize River of Smoke was out. I will have to see if the local library has it yet. I greatly enjoyed Sea of Poppies.

>64 alcottacre: River of Smoke was published in the UK on June 9, but it won't be released in the US until late September. I'll start reading it later today.

#65: Ah, OK. Thanks for the clarification. It looks as though it will be a while before I can get my hands on it then.

More Beer, the second in Jakob Arjouni's series about a Turkish private eye in Frankfurt is better than the first. The writing is more careful, the jokes are funnier, and the cynical view the private eye takes of things more penetrating. Great title, too.

A Turkish private eye in Frankfurt, huh? I will have to see if my local library has that series!

Donald S. Lopez's The Tibetan Book of The Dead: A Biography is an elegantly written and surpassingly subtle account of how selections from a cycle of Tibetan texts found there way into Western consciousness through the offices of an interpreter more steeped in the bloviations of the theosophists than in Buddhism as it's actually practiced. The parallel Lopez suggests between the interpreter in question, Walter Evans-Wentz, and the always questionable Joseph Smith is apposite and worth the price of admission.

Jan Costin Wagner's Ice Moon is a well-done psychological thriller in which the author, having told the story in alternating strands, one featuring the policeman, the othe the killer, pulls off the difficult trick of actually making us sympathize with the thoroughly batty murderer of three.

The novel is set in Finland, and the characters are Finns. I picked it up in preparation for a visit to Finland in the hope that it might in some way illuminate the country. Unfortunately, there's not much local flavor. It could be set in any cold, dark, Northern nation.

#70: I will give that one a try.

Have a wonderful trip to Finland!

Fred Singleton's A Short History of Finland is a model of the sort of short and informative history of a country that one wants to read before a visit. The writing is lucid, the organization clear, and the facts of Finnish history are presented in such a way as to keep one turning the pages. An expert in Finland would surely be disappointed, but for readers going in as ignorant about Suomi as I was (I'm slightly less ignorant now) Singleton gets it just right. Now, back to Bo Carpelan's Axel.

Tove Jansson's The Summer Book sounds insufferably twee: anecdotes about an old woman approaching death, and her six-year-old grand-daughter, just awaking to life. Jansson somehow skirts the saccharine shoals and gives us a novel modernist in its obliquity and method—twenty-two all but unconnected vignettes—profound in its examination of life, absolutely charming, and, not least, funny.

Jan Costin Wagner's Silence is an entirely satisfying psychological thriller, one nuanced enough to acknowledge that pedophiles can suffer as much torment as they may cause others. Wagner's detective is, in the best Scandinavian style, a depressive, and in that respect as in others the novel seems set in a generalized Scandinavia rather than the Finland I hoped to learn about in preparation for an upcoming trip, but that quibble is entirely extra-literary. If you are not planning a trip to Suomi ignore it.

#73: I really want to read that one. I am glad to see you enjoyed it!

Continuing my crash course in all things Finnish, I've just completed the poet Bo Carpelan's elegiac novel, Axel. Based on the life of Carpelan's great uncle Axel, the novel consists of short narratives about that uncle's life interspersed with entries from his diaries. Axel, deeply moved by music, is unable to either record the music that comes to him during his sleepless nights or to continue playing the violin. What appears to be hypochondria and other nervous disabilities cripple him. In his sorrow and frustration, but also in his sensitivity, perceptiveness and humor, the narrator calls to mind the Kafka of the diaries. The bright spot in his life, which we follow from 1868 until his death in 1919, is his friendship with Sibelius. Love of art, sadness, yearning and, ultimately, peace: all are exquisitely rendered in what must be a master-piece of Finnish literature.

Axel sound like a book I'd love. Thanks for bringing it to my attention.

#76: Axel sounds wonderful! Thanks for that recommendation.

I loved Sea of Poppies, and had River of Smoke out from the library, but didn't get to read it before someone else requested it. But I want to get it back again soon!

And I have a copy of The Summer Book with me on holiday, and really hope to get to read it (especially as it's short) before I go home. I'm glad to hear a good review of it - haven't heard it mentioned much on LT.

What's not to like about a wise-cracking Turkish detective in Frankfurt? Not much. Kismet is, like the rest in the series, a well-written hard-boiled yarn. I hope Arjouni will produce or has produced more in the series, and that Melville House will continue to make them available to those of us who don't read German.

I am glad that the series continues to be a good one for you! I wish my local library carried it.

One can see why the Chinese government hates Ai Weiwei. The artful criticism he posted on his blog over more than three years until the government shut it down, like his political art, is relentlessly honest. He pulled no punches, and he did so under a very real threat of imprisonment (as we recently saw) or worse; this makes the "bravery" of American ranters seem just a little less impressive. There is a quotable line, an inspiration, an insight, a belly laugh—rueful, for the most part—on every page. Ai Weiwei is a hero of our time. Kudos to MIT Press for making Ai Weiwei's Blog: Writings, Interviews, and Digital Rants, 2006-2009 available to anglophone readers.

Confusion. Volume three of Elizabeth Jane Howard's Cazalet Chronicle continues to be fluff of the highest quality. As this one, set in the last years of World War II, seems mostly concerned with who each of the girls and women will couple with, illicitly or otherwise, it's a bit soap-operaish at times, but still, compulsively readable. I will certainly, with volume four, finish out the series. I need to see how the Cazalets and their circle survive the early years of the post-war peace.

Under the North Star by Väinö Lina is the first volume of a Finnish epic novel dealing with Finnish history from the 1880s through the 1950s. Because of its humor, and the author's ability to move from the personal to the historical and back with ease, one thinks (as Linna certainly did) of Tolstoy. It's the perfect compliment to the short history of Finland I read last month, humanizing as it does the historian's facts with a view mostly from the bottom—the lives of Finnish tennant farmers. I look forward to continuing, with Linna, through the decades.

It had been at the back of my mind that I should read Daphne Du Maurier's Rebecca, so when I stumbled across (in Helsinki of all places) an edition published by The Albatross, Ltd.—a pioneering paperback publisher, a forerunner of Penguin—in their Modern Continental Library in 1947, and for just three Euros, well, I had to give it a go. It is a more than competent gothic romance, reminiscent of both Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. The male who is our heroine's romantic obsession, the murderous upper-class twit, Maxim de Winter, certainly recalls Heathcliff in his general lack of attractiveness. It would be interesting to tease out the class anxiety that underlies the novel: the landed gentry's fear and confusion as they were losing the means to live on their estates in the manner to which they had been accustomed, the disruption caused by an interloper—the narrator, the second Mrs. de Winter—from the lower classes.

Parody, as translator Krystyna Anna Steiger points out, is a complex form, and Vyacheslav Pyetsukh's The New Moscow Philosophy, parodic in at least a couple different ways, bears this out. With its restricted cast of characters—residents of a communal apartment in Moscow—attempting to get to the bottom of a fellow resident's disappearance and presumed murder, it is an out and out lampoon of an Agatha Christie-like mystery. It is, at the same time, a humorous look at Russian literature, especially Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, of which, we come to realize, it is a version. It pokes fun at, but is at the same time in awe of Dostoevsky's, and by extension other Russian masters', achievements The New Moscow Philosophy is a rare parody that is as pleasure-filled as its inspirations (or should I say targets) and is well worth a read in its own right. As one turns the pages, snickers and giggles soon give way to guffaws.

Perhaps the best novel I've read this year, Teju Cole's Open City is the diary like account of a year of so (leavened with memories) in the life of a Nigerian psychiatric resident living in New York City. It is a meditation on the lives of immigrants, but more importantly a meditation on pain, the pain those immigrants and others feel and have felt, and how a comfortable and bookish sort like our protagonist experiences and deals with (or doesn't deal with) that pain, and also with the pain he has caused. Cole's intelligence, his cultural breadth, and his prose are breathtaking.

I'm glad that you also enjoyed Open City; it's one of my favorite novels of the year.

Kidzdoc: Open City is an astounding novel. The New Yorker review doesn't really seem to come to grips with it, but it is better than most of the commentary I've seen on it. So many readers seem surprised that a novel without submarines and machine guns . . . I mean without lots of busy action could be worth reading. Others are upset that the narrator doesn't react when the woman confronts him at the end—but of course the narrator's lack of reaction, or his self-reported lack of reaction, is entirely what, by that point in the novel, we've come to expect from our boy.

Stella Dong's Shanghai: The Rise and Fall of a Decadent City is an impressionistic history of "The Pearl of the East." She throws enough colorful characters and astounding events at us that it is a quick and interesting read, but it would have benefitted from a tighter structure. Dong doesn't seem to want to say anything particular about Shanghai except that this sensational event happened and then that intriguing character passed through. An overarching vision, a guiding thesis, would have made this a better book. Her predilection for the sensational is evident in her subtitle: Surely a decadent city is one engaged in a long and lurid fall? Can a city on the rise really be decadent?

Jonathan Porter's history of Macau, Macau: The Imaginary City, is much less sensational than Stella Dong's chronicle of Shanghai (see above), perhaps because Porter is an academic historian in a way that Dong is not, but also, maybe, because Macau, as Porter makes clear, has, for the last 300 or so years, been a pretty sleepy place. Macau's sleepiness, its position out of the mainstream of history, are exactly what make it charming, and it still is charming (I've just returned from a visit), though Porter was much more pessimistic about Macau's future in his book's conclusion (it was published in 1996) than, we now know, was warranted. I wonder if the Portuguese antique shop owner who, Porter reports, was so worried about the colony's reversion to Chinese control that he was preparing to flee, regrets his decision.

Levy Hideo is reputed to be, as his translator (from Japanese to English) puts it, "the first white American novelist to write in Japanese." That being the case, it's hard not to wonder how many reviewers will trot out Samuel Johnson's line in their reviews of A Room Where the Star Spangled Banner Cannot Be Heard. The amazing thing about this novel is not, however, that it was done at all, but that it was done so well. The premise—young American male finding himself in Japan—has been done and done again, but Levy makes it new in that his protagonist does not, as most of these fish-out-of-water do, experience Japan as a means of getting in touch with his inner American, but rather repudiates the America where Kennedy has been murdered and that is sinking deeper into the Vietnam debacle. He finds himself between two cultures, but listing decisively toward the Japanese. Levy's prose, rendered in English by Christopher D. Scott, is striking, as are the images he sprinkles throughout the book's pages. Let's hope people can get past their "wow, look, a monkey riding a bicycle" reactions, and see this for what it is: a novel worth reading.

Red Shambhala by Andrei Znamenski is an interesting account of how Bolsheviks and others have attempted to make use of Buddhist and other prophecies in their attempts to take power in Tibet, Mongolia, Siberia, and other parts of Asia. The cast of characters—spies, monks, revolutionaries, new-age frauds, and true believers—is worth the price of admission, and Znamenski, unintentionally I assume, makes the book more interesting by engaging in some pretty free speculation (lots of "might have," "may have," and "it is possible"), and also by keeping the reader guessing as to how credulous he is about the various Shambhala prophecies that influence his actors, and also about how sincere these actors were in their own professions of belief.

Most of the 1000+ pages of Neal Stephenson's Reamde novel are taken up with people running away from people, or chasing people, with intent to kill or to keep from being killed. It is, in other words, a thriller that moves with ease from continent to continent and, in the best thriller-tradition, spends a great deal of time describing the minutiae of firearms and how they work. All of which is to say Reamde would be a bore if it were not written by Neal Stephenson. Stephenson is able to populate his improbable plot with improbable characters who, if we never quite believe in them, amuse the hell out of us nevertheless, and to make, through the consciousness of these characters, observations about the state of the world that are off kilter in just the right way. Though Reamde is not as good as the Baroque Trilogy, or even Cryptonomicon, it's still a fun read.

Nagai Kafu’s Rivalry, according to Edward Seidensticker, is, “on the one hand nostalgic, lyrical, and reminiscent, and on the other a modern social novel, purporting to show how life for geisha really is.” Seidensticker’s description is accurate, but while he believes that Kafu fails to convince us “to accept the geisha and her quarter as simultaneously an escape from crass reality and the embodiment of crass reality,” in fact, the dance between Kafu’s loving descriptions of a dying but still elegant demimonde, and the geisha’s less elegant struggle for survival, makes the book richer than it would have been if it were limited to either unadulterated nostalgic effusion or gritty social commentary. The grit that is present keeps the novel from floating off into the ether; the effusions, when they occur, are the high points of the book.

Quite a discussion of Geisha in Rivalry at #22 et seq on this thread.
http://www.librarything.com/topic/53044

Thanks for the link. The touchstone I used is actually not for the edition I read, Stephen Snyder's translation which is titled simply Rivalry. This is, I believe the same edition that Donald Richie read for his review (linked to in the thread). Oddly, I read it because I was asked to review the new edition of Snyder's translation for the same paper.

As I note in my review (as yet unpublished, so I won't provide a link to it here), the geisha in Rivalry certainly do engage in lots of prostitute-like activity, and Kafu certainly knew that world, so I don't doubt the veracity of his account.