Books dcozy Read in 2010

In the connected stories of In Other Rooms, Other Wonders Daniyal Mueenuddin gives us a panoramic account of Pakistani society, and in so doing reveals how feudal it remains, and how feudalism is both reassuring—one has one's place and knows it—and brutal—when one's protectors die it is all too easy, particularly if one is female, to be cut adrift in a world where to be alone is to be nothing. The elegance of Mueenuddin's prose reveals that he understands that, in writing about such things, understatement is more effective than wailing.

Glad to see you back for another year!

Welcome back!

Thanks for the welcomes. And it's good to see you here, too.

Howdy!

I'll be lurking again this year.

Great! Welcome.

Alan Hollinghurst's first novel, The Swimming Pool Library, was excellent, and since that impressive debut he's only got better. The Line of Beauty is, to date, his masterpiece. The subtlety of the characterization is evocative of Henry James (the main character is studying the Master's work). The style is less convoluted than James's but equally pleasurable, and Hollinghurst is certainly funnier. It is a strength of the novel that one still isn't quite sure what to make of the the main character, Nick, at the end: the hard truths spoken to him in the book's last pages seem, at least in part, true, but so full is Hollinghurst's portrait of him that, in Nick's believable humanity, we cannot dismiss him entirely as the scheming opportunist he, at least some of the time, is.

In his collection of essays and reviews, What are Intellectuals Good For?, George Scialabba demonstrates what intellectuals—understood as free-lance, independent, wide ranging thinkers—are good for. In Scialabba's considerations of thinkers such as Richard Rorty, Ellen Willis, and Christopher Lasch, we are treated to a probing intelligence coupled with flawless style, abundant wit, and a fierce moral and political intelligence. Any one of those qualities might make an essay or review worth reading. To find them all together is a rare and wonderful treat. (His earlier short collection, Divided Mind, is available as a PDF from the author's website.)

I thought I had this one, but I don't (at least it isn't in my LT library). One of these days I want to read Anti-Intellectualism in American Life by Richard Hofstadter, which won the 1964 Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction. Have you read it?

I haven't read Anti-intellectualism, though it is sitting on my shelf, and anti-intellectualism is still, it seems to me, a force in the good old US of A.

I had thought, at the end of the second volume of Lewis Grassic Gibbon's A Scots Quair, that Ewan, Chris Colquohoun's son, would, given his interests and rationalist bent, go on to become a scientist. I had forgotten that, early last century, there was another road on which a young person with such a sensibility might embark: the one signposted "scientific socialism." Most of the drama of Grey Granite has to do with Ewan's conversion to communism, and his entry into the life of a revolutionary. His activist existence is contrasted with that of his mother who remains entirely unclubable, a true independent both in thought and in action. To watch the contrasting ideas that form the lives of these two characters, and the history against which they play out, is a treat, A Scots Quair a forgotten masterpiece.

A Scots Quair is on the list of books I want to get to this year on the recommendation of another 75er. I bought a copy last year since my local library does not have it. I am glad to have confirmation of its 'masterpiece' status.

I've embarked on my second voyage through Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin series of novels about life in the English navy. The first volume in the series, Master and Commander, is even better than I remembered it. The comparisons to Jane Austen are not misplaced. Both authors used confined and rigid societies--the country house, the ship--to tell us truths small and large about humanity, and both write dialogue rich in wit.

I really like that series. O'Brian did such a good job of developing their friendship and explaining the world they lived in.

So glad you enjoyed A Scot's Quair. It truly is an underappreciated gem that more people need to read.

Patriots and Traitors: Sorge and Ozaki is a "casebook," which means that, rather than being a monograph on the Sorge spy ring it's a miscellany of takes on that topic. The good news is that, it's not a hodgepodge: the pieces resonate well together. We get, in addition to J.Thomas Rimer's introduction, Chalmers Johnson on Hotsumi Ozaki's motivations for spying, Ozaki's prison letters to his wife and daughter, Junji Kinoshita's play "A Japanese Called Otto," and Keiko McDonald's reflections on two films that have been made about the Sorge affair. Perhaps Rimer is correct that people are still interested in the Sorge/Ozaki affair more than half a century after both men were executed because the moral dilemmas around patriotism and indivduality are still problematic. Maybe, however, it's just that people like a good spy story.

Patriots and Traitors: Sorge and Ozaki looks interesting. I will have to see if I can locate a copy. Thanks for the recommendation!

Killing Kanoko by Hiromi Ito

Hiromi Ito's poetry is often described as "shamanistic." Apparently when she performs her poems she sometimes "sits on the floor like a shamaness and raps on a drum" (that's translator Jeffrey Angles, from the notes). One can get tired of that sort of thing, along with the insistence that oral poetry is somehow more authentic than poetry on the page, pretty quickly. Talent, however, excuses everything, and Hiromi Ito has that. Her shamanistic outpourings, especially the long prose poem that closes the collection, "I am Anjuhimeko," are, for the most part, a pleasure to read, but Ito's repertoire doesn't stop there. She also writes poems in a more stripped down, austere style that demonstrate tremendous delicacy and finesse. Ito's openness about sex, the body, and unacceptable desires (to kill, for example, one's child) are not now as shocking as they must have been a couple decades ago; it's clear, therefore, that her work is much more than merely transgressive.

Strangers on a Train is a taut thriller leavened with a healthy dose of misanthropy: just the sort of thing we've come to expect from Patricia Highsmith. She's a fine enough craftswoman that the very 1950ish existentialism and Freudianism she draws on aren't terribly distracting. Perhaps its time to delve into the Ripley books again, and also to have a look at the recent biography.

I have never read anything by Highsmith but have been meaning to since Kerry (aviatkh) mentioned her biography last year. Thanks for the reminder!

Michael Hofmann's intemperate take-down of Zweig in the LRB inspired me to pull Beware of Pity off the shelf, and I am grateful to Mr. Hofmann. It is exactly what one looks for in a fin-de-siècle Austrian novel: overheated, Freudian, fueled with secrets and repressions. I will read more Zweig (though if I can believe Joan Acocella--and since she is one of our great critics I probably can--Beware of Pity was the pinnacle of Zweig's achievement; I may be disappointed.

Love Patricia Highsmith. I've read most of her works, but I must get to her biography--she sounds like an unusual person.

The Post-Office Girl by Stefan Zweig

Based on the two Zweig novels I've read, it seems that he likes to burden his characters with tragic and unchangeable fates evocative of Sophocles. Just as, from the first few pages of Oedipus Rex, one never imagines that Oedipus will live happily ever after—indeed, one is quite certain of the contrary—so in Zweig's novels. Reading of the post-office girl and the deadening monotony of her life scraping by as a functionary in a village post office, one understands—even when, though an odd bit of luck, she finds herself living the high life at a Swiss resort—that she will tumble. Tumble she does: in the closing pages of the book it looks like suicide will be her lot. This turns out not to be the case, but the "out" that Zweig dangles in front of her is so precarious that one comes to see that giving her this chance is simply a more subtle way of letting the reader experience her defeat, a defeat which will come after the last page is turned, in the mind of the reader. Her tragedy is more vivid for that.

Nice description of the Zweig book. Darryl (kidzdoc) read it last year and recommended it highly. I just need to track down a copy.

I really look forward to reading Zweig....some day.

I'm having terrible insomnia and I confess I've been moseying my way through the 75 booker's threads, adding books to my library, enjoying the pocket reviews, -- and yours are very good!

Sibyx:

Thanks for the compliment and for dropping by. May you have a good night's sleep.

too late for that! It's around 7 a.m. here now! But no work for anybody as we are paralyzed by snow. Except for shoveling I plan to stay inside andhave what we call 'a bathrobe day!' reading and writing and playing around on LT!

#26: Actually, I haven't read The Post-Office Girl yet, although I'll read it very soon. I read Chess Story and Journey into the Past last year, and Amok and Other Stories and Wondrak and Other Stories this year; the first two books were exceptional, and the latter two were very good.

#31: Oops! My bad. Sorry, Darryl, I thought that was one of the ones you recommended last year. Hmm, I wonder who did. I had added it to the BlackHole already.

I've turned the last pages of Stefan Zweig's late novella, Chess Story, and thus my Zweigathon has drawn to a close (it's the last Zweig on my shelf). I enjoyed it, The Post-Office Girl, and Beware of Pity enough that I will certainly read more Zweig. In Chess Story the words are as carefully chosen as the moves a chess master makes in the game with which Zweig's character becomes obsessed, an obsession that helps him to escape from the Nazis but at the same time makes it unlikely that he will escape from the game that has taken such a prominent place in his mind. One doubts Zweig's protagonist ever will find freedom; rather, as with most of Zweig's tragically doomed characters, one would not be surprised if, as his creator did, he finds relief only in suicide.

I like the format: one longish short story (56 pages) in a neat little volume that easily slips into a pocket. Sometimes short stories in a collection can have their force muted by their proximity to so many other short tales. Isolating one, as New Directions has chosen to do in extracting Mishima's "Patriotism" from the collection Death in Midsummer and Other Stories, is an effective way to highlight it. I wouldn't even object to paying nearly 17 cents a page (actually, I got the book for free) if the content were worthwhile. Alas, as is so often the case with the vastly overrated Yukio Mishima, it is not. The main interest of Patriotism lies in the odd experience of reading the story of two right-wing extremists as written in the doting prose of another right-wing extremist. That is to say, the story has little literary appeal; such attraction as it does possess draws from the same sump as, say, a ranting, conspiracy-obsessed, web page one might have the misfortune to stumble across and not click immediately away from (though Mishima's prose, at least in Geoffrey W. Sargent's translation, may not be as good as that of an accomplished ranter).

Don't believe me? How's this:

"Reiko's body was white and pure, and her swelling breasts conveyed a firm and chaste refusal; but upon consent, those breasts were lavish with their intimate, welcoming warmth. Even in her bed these two were frighteningly and awesomely serious."

I'm pretty sure that it is not Reiko's breasts that are "frighteningly and awesomely serious," but the couple, Reiko and her husband. I can't be positive, though, because breasts that can convey chaste refusals are probably also capable of the sort of high earnestness that Mishima loves so much.

Finally, let me note that in the book's fifty-six pages I count eleven typos (I have corrected one in the above quotation) One expects a lot better from New Directions. Mishima, on the other hand, in this turgid and over-written tale, has given us exactly what we have come to expect.

#34: OK, skipping that one. I do hope your next book is better for you!

Okay, the business with the codicil to a will—standard stuff in Victorian novels—is a bit overly tangled at the end, and Amy Dorrit is impossibly good, but when considered as tiny bits of the immense world that Dickens gives us in Little Dorrit these slight stumbles are nothing. The novel is a delight from beginning to (slightly confusing) end. Not the best of Dickens, but good enough to make one wonder why people bother with pastiches of Victorian fiction, or with "historical" novels set in Victorian times, when the real thing is so much more satisfying.

I wanted to drop by and thank you for the recommendation on one of your threads for Waterlog by Roger Deakin. I read it this past week and thoroughly enjoyed it. Thanks!

"She's the top suspense writer of them all," said Raymond Chandler of Elisabeth Sanxay Holding, and reading Lady Killer, one sees why. A taut and unblinking look at aberrant human psychology. I look forward to Miasma, with which Lady Killer is paired in the Stark House edition.

#38: I found the Stark House edition out on PBS, so I will give it a shot. Thanks for the recommendation.

Miasma was, apparenly, Elisabeth Sanxay Holding's first thriller, and while it's not as accomplished as Lady Killer (see comment above) it's still a cracking good read. The plot is probably more tangled than it should be, but the main character—an austere Calvinist—and his antagonist, a classical hedonist are well drawn, and, in their opposite approaches to life, provide the book with a bit more philosophical heft than one expects in 1930s thrillers.

Time at War is a memoir of World War II unusual in that it is not burdened by any of the "greatest generation" nonsense that disfigures so much American writing about that time in history. It is written with the care, and also with the philosophical earnestness, that one has come to expect from Nicholas Mosley, and will certainly send one back to his other memoirs, to his novels, and to his biography of his father, fascist leader Oswald Mosley.

#41: I read about Oswald Mosley in The Sisters: the Saga of the Mitford Family. I would be interested in reading both the biography and Time at War.

Mosley talks a good deal about his father in Time at War. It seems clear that being the son of a man who had come to be seen as villian in wartime Britain was one of the things that motivated Mosley to go to war.

#43: Thanks for the additional info!

The Glass Key is the first Dashiell Hammett novel I've read in a while, and also, though he's always good, the first one that seems to me to make him worthy of being spoken of, as he often is, in the same breath as Raymond Chandler. His vision of political corruption rings as true as protagonist Ned Beaumont's fragility: Beaumont is a tough guy who is a human being, not a superhero. I'm inspired, now, to read and reread Hammett's other fiction.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Moshin Hamid is a monologue: a man--the reluctant fundamentalist of the title--explaining the course his life has taken to an interlocutor who is not silent, but whose words we never hear. This would be too much for many writers, but Hamid pulls it off brilliantly. He keeps us riveted from first page to last, even though the events of the final pages are not hard to predict. People who refuse to allow that it is possible for anyone to have a legitimate grievance against the United States may find this book disturbing. Let's hope it disturbs them in the right way.

Although on a smaller scale, Jeremy M. Davies's Rose Alley is reminiscent of Georges Perec's Life: A User's Manual in its manic imaginativeness, its fecundity of metaphor, and most of all in the wonderful stories it contains. Each chapter focuses on one character involved in the making of a film that is to be shot in Paris during the events of 1968 about an attack—supposed to have been instigaged by John Wilmot, the Earl of Rochester—on John Dryden. There's a grin in every line, and a giggle on every page, The constraints that Davies employs—he's an enthusiast of the OuLiPo—have allowed him fruitful liberty. Harry Matthews says, "You have no excuse for no reading this book." I agree.

Thanks for reminding me that I want to read The Reluctant Fundamentalist this week, so I can lend it to my son when he comes home.

I loved Life: A User's Manual, so I'll be looking for Rose Alley. I, too, found The Reluctant Fundamentalist a very powerful book.

arubabookwoman, I'm happy to find a reader whose tastes are broad enough that she can like both those very different books.

Hi. First time for me on your thread. I like a lot of the same books as you - both of those in #49 and also the Zweigs! I have held off reading Beware of Pity in case I don't like it as much as the shorter ones, but I am planning to read it in the next couple of weeks. Have you read The World of Yesterday and did you like that, too? I read a library copy and am now on the lookout for a copy of my own (I have rules, though - it has to be second hand, so it might take a while to find). Based on your recommendation, I'll look for books by Elisabeth Sanxay Holding, too, and I'm looking forward to seeing what you read next.
Janet

Thanks for writing, Janet. I think you'll enjoy Beware of Pity, and I think I'll enjoy The World of Yesterday: I'm on the lookout for it--used or new!.

All the best,

A mystery set in 19th century Istanbul and featuring a eunuch detective sounds, at first, a bit too precious, but Jason Goodwin, in The Janissary Tree, pulls it off. The eunuch is endearing, the tidbits of Ottoman history and Istanbul-living are interesting, and the pace is just as breakneck as that of a thriller should be. This is intelligent and satisfying escapism.

#53: I have that one on the way to me from Paperback Swap already. I am glad to hear that you liked it.

>53 dcozy:: I read that one either with the 2008 or 2009 group...I can't remember...and rather enjoyed it. I have both The Snake Stone (sequel to The Janissary Tree) and On Foot to the Golden Horn (a travel book about his trip to Istanbul) waiting to be read.

Hi. Just wanted to say that I read Holding's The Blank Wall and really liked it. Still trying to find Lady Killer.

M. Thomas Gammarino's Big in Japan is yet another young-male-finds-himself-in-Japan, finds himself while there, loses himself while there, and maybe finds himself again novel. Although tales of this sort have been told and told again, it must be said that Gammarino does it well. His prose is fluent, he's not overly concerned with realism, but does give us some views inside the Japanese sex industry that ring true; he's capable of pleasantly jarring metaphor, and he's funny. If you're in the mood for an American male abroad sort of reading experience Big in Japan is as satisfying an exemplar of the genre as you'll find.

"That's what ordinary life is, isn't it. Carrying on as usual."
"Does that sound boring to you?"
"It sounds it, but when you're in it, it isn't."

This snatch of dialogue, from Elizabeth Jane Howard's The Light Years, captures quite well Howard's achievement in this book, and, presumably, in the remaining books in The Cazalet Chronicles. Not much of any consequence happens to a not very remarkable upper class English family (the households of which, of course, include lots of not so upper class people who keep their betters' world ticking along), and Howard recounts their drift through time so skilfully that we are absorbed from first page to last. Her characterizations are deep enough that we become interested in each of the characters whose consciousnesses she allows us to enter. Readers will want to continue the series to see how the Cazalets' idyll will be disrupted by World War II which is looming over the their country home at novel's end.

#58: I already have that one in the BlackHole. I really must get to it soon.

Alan Tansman is a careful scholar, and so, in The Aesthetics of Japanese Fascism, issues a truckload of caveats about any claim he might come close to making that this or that artist was a fascist, this or that work is fascist, or that this or that artist or work fortified Japanese fascism. One is left, therefore, with a book that is, in the end, arguing for very little, and sometimes in ways incorrect and illogical. Having said that, though, Tansman has many interesting things to say about the out-of-the-way cultural artifacts he unearths, and the insights remain interesting even if one is unconvinced by the fairly limp argument they are meant to support.

Tokyo Megacity is a coffee table book, and as such is probably not meant to read. Not reading it, though, will mean that flipping through it one will take in only Ben Simmons's not terribly exciting photographs and will miss Donald Richie's typically astute essays about the megacity and several of its neighborhoods. That would be a pity, because Richie is always interesting on what has become his hometown. True, some of the insights we've read before, but one understands why Richie repeats himself. So many people would still rather see Japan and the Japanese through the scrim of their odd (though common) preconceptions that they're unable to do what Richie does: see what is actually there, and then tell us about it in lucid prose. Have a cup of coffee, and enjoy.

#61: Too bad my local library does not have that one. I know my oldest daughter would love to look at the pictures!

50 Poems by Osip Mandelstam. Translated by Bernard Meares.

If a form can be said to have a tendency, poetry seems to have an unhealthy urge to drift toward the numinous. Fortunately, there are poets who are appalled by this tendency, and who, perhaps recognizing it in their own early work, go on to combat it. Mandelstam, in rejecting what translator Bernard Meares calls the symbolists' "self-indulgent mystical paraphernalia," was, I think, one of these. His poems are earthy, difficult, and anchored in the real, not eschewing even the physics of light. Meares's introduction is helpful. Joseph Brodsky's essay is less so: one is surprised that this is the best a Russian poet, one who clearly values Mandelstam's work, could do.

Everyone needs a good thriller from time to time, and I've found that of contemporary thriller-meisters, Michael Connelly usually manages to satisfy. His books are set in Los Angeles, and that's where I usually read them, but as I won't be in the New World again for a while, and The Brass Verdict fell into my hands, I figured I'd plow through it here in the archipelago. It did the trick, though I find Mickey Haller less engaging than the grumpy Harry Bosch (who appears in this book, but is not the main character).

Because I knew it would be excellent, I put off reading Gary Snyder's Danger on Peaks. I was holding it in reserve: a pleasure deferred. Yesterday I could wait no longer, and I was not disappointed. Once again, Snyder makes it look easy, even as he dazzles with his range and skill. The works collected are, for the first time, I think, in Snyder's oeuvre, tempered by the auburn glow of old age.

Most of my work,
such as it is is done,"

he writes.

What marvelous work it has been.

What marvelous work it is.

A book about Japanese who are forgotten by an author who, in English, is unknown: In making this book available to those of us illiterate in Japanese, translator Jeffrey Irish has done us a tremendous service. Anyone interested in how things used to be in rural Japan (and in some places, to differing extents, still are) will want to read ethnologist Tsuneichi Miyamoto's accounts of his travels on foot up and down the archipelago, and will relish the stories he gathered. Japanese peasants, we learn, traveled more than we might have thought, were much more promiscuous than we might have imagined (especially if we haven't read Pink Samurai: Nicholas Bornoff draws heavily on Miyamoto's work) and lived lives that are fascinating in many, many ways. The Forgotten Japanese, a fine example of history from below, goes onto the short shelf of essential books about Japan.

The Forgotten Japanese looks interesting. I will have to see if I can locate a copy. Thanks for the recommendation.

Zoran Živković is no Jorge Luis Borges, but then who is?

He has, however, learned from the master that to use an overheated tone is ineffective when writing about the fantastic, and his concerns—at least in this volume—are no less bookish than Borges's: each tale involves a library. The stories seem, at times, to be written to a template (inexplicable occurrance, increasingly insane attempts to deal with it or deny it, acceptance) but it is a template that works. I look forward to the other volumes in the edition of Živković's work just released by Kurodahan Press, a small publisher worthy of support.

Miss Tamara, the Reader is a collection of short stories, all concerning Miss Tamara, and all concerning books and fruit. Fantastic things happen to Miss Tamara in and around her reading: a book causes blindness; postcards slipped between pages tell her what to do; she is hired to keep an author who plans to kill himself alive by reading his work aloud, and so on. One understands the comparisons to Borges (why always Borges and never Calvino?), but where the fantastic elements in Borges's tales always seem inevitable, in Zoran Živković's they sometimes feel gratuitous—the fruit, for example.

Even as it is about race, religion, tribalism, and other weighty and important issues, and even if the holocaust hovers over all, Lore Segal's Her First American (which is also a love story) remains a sprightly read. It is to be recommended both for its insight into America, its successes and failings, but also for Segal's brilliant and stereotype-free characterizations. Stanley Crouch is right that, as he notes in the introduction, "No single character is just white or black, Christian or Jew, an achievement that comes through Lore Segal's fearless evocation of points of view, beliefs, and animosities. Whatever their backgrounds, not one of these men or women escapes the irresistible literary net with which Segal captures the differently hued butterflies of human personality."

#70: I will look for that one. It sounds too good to pass up. Thanks for another great recommendation!

Having finished the fourth volume of George Lyttelton and Rupert Hart-Davis's letters, I now have only volumes five and six (collected in one volume) left to go. I will miss these two book-loving Englishmen when I'm done. A letter or two are just the thing for when one wants to read a page or two before dropping off. (Will Hart-Davis ever finish his edition of Oscar Wilde's letters? It'll be a nail-biting race through the last volumes to see if he can manage it.)

#72: David, what is the title of the one volume compilation of the letters?

Sorry, I wasn't clear. What I meant was that volumes 5 and 6 of the letters appear as one book, while each of the previous volumes got a book to itself.

OK, so is each book titled The Letters of George Lyttleton, volume 1 and so on?

Right. Volume 1,2,3 . . . and so on.

Yoshihiro Tatsumi is—or was, anyway, when he was a young man—a fan of the poor man's, the very poor man's, Raymond Chandler: Mickey Spillane, and Spillane's fingerprints are all over Tatsumi's 1956 thriller, Black Blizzard. It's all melodrama, all the time: star-crossed lovers, a murder, a train crash, criminals shackled together making a run for it, a brutal father, a father who turns out not to be a father, a thug with a heart of gold (who is also a father), and, of course, a happy ending. Tatsumi, aged twenty-one, with, already, more than seventeen book-length manuscripts already under his belt, whipped this one off in a mere twenty days, and he describes feeling a sort of physical high as he worked on it. This comes through in the art: frames slashed through with diagonals that perfectly reveal the shackled fugitives flight through mountains and town, and propel readers with the fugitives through the pages at a pace that means the book will be finished all too soon. You'll want to read it again, though, slowing down on your second pass through to savor Tatsumi's art.

#76: Thanks, David. I will look for them.

Amarcord is the most satisfying of the three Živković books I've read so far because, of those three, it is the most formally rigorous (though I want to go back now and see if I missed some formal rigor in the earlier books). The theme for this suite of stories is memory, most often as something separable from the individual who has had the experiences recalled. Živković's explores the ramifications of such a state of affairs, and in the last story pulls the disparate pieces together into a satisfying whole.

In creating a book that looks like it's designed to attract high school girls rather than grownups who are interested in learning about them, the designers of Japanese Schoolgirl Confidential do not do author Brian Ashcraft and his collaborator, Shoko Ueda, any favors. Many potential readers will be turned off by what, at first, seems an overly busy lay-out, and this is a shame, because they will miss an exemplary work of pop-scholarship, one in which the authors are able to call on wide and sound knowledge of art, film, and sociology, as well as good old shoe-leather journalism to help us understand "how," as the subtitle puts it, "teenage girls made a nation cool." The product is engaging from first page to last.

Two cities share the same space in some odd, overlapping way, and the citizens of each are required to "unsee" not only their counterparts in the overlapping city, but indeed the whole other place: this is the premise of China Miéville's The City & The City. It's a serviceable science fiction yarn, but in invoking both Raymond Chandler and Franz Kafka, Miéville sets himself up for a fall: it's hard to be that good. One is also disappointed—given that Miéville is himself a scholar and a man of the left—that the bad guy is the vaguely hippyish academic. Haven't we had enough "the intellectual did it" stories? Miéville did keep me reading, though, and I may just give Perdido Street Station, which has been on my shelf for a while, a go.

I've been interested in and enjoyed all of Kenzaburo Oe's work that has become available in English (though I don't think I was quite ready for The Silent Cry when, in my early twenties, I tackled it). I've been interested in Oe's work, and enjoyed it, but I've never been able to say I've loved an Oe novel. Now, having finished The Changeling, I can. This is an example of the glories of a late style, of an author who understand his medium, and knows how to make it sing. Not atypically for Oe, the novel is autobiographical. It circles around the suicide of a successful film-maker called Goro, who happens to be the brother-in-law of a well-regarded novelist. (Juzo Itami, who committed suicide, was Kenzaburo Oe's brother-in-law.) It leads from that film-maker's death backward and forward to a birth, and along the way visits biblical exegesis, Maurice Sendak, nationalist politics, film, art, theories of the novel, and much besides, and is riveting from first page to last.

I'm glad to hear that you liked The Changeling; if I don't get to it this month I'll definitely read it next month.

The second volume of Elizabeth Jane Howard's Cazalet Chronicle is called Marking Time, and as that's largely what the book is about—marking time while trapped in the English countryside as World War II is getting under way. It must have been a difficult book to write. The people the novel focuses on are too young to take part in adult pursuits, too old or too female to fight, and are, therefore, simply marking time in the English countryside waiting for something to happen. That Howard makes one care about the characters she studies in this fine, old-fashioned, vaguely soap-operaish novel, is an achievement and provide lots of pleasant reading. I will continue with the Chronicle.

It looks as though my local library has all four books in the Cazalet Chronicle, so I will be checking them out some time. Thanks for the recommendation of the series.

There is a lot more to language than language, a lot more to English than English. This will not come as news to those of us who've spent our lives in the English-teaching trenches in Japan. Rather, "our use of language," as Philip Seargeant writes in The Idea of English in Japan, "is always influenced by the ideas we form of language." Using a more or less ethnographic approach, Sergeant explores those ideas: how they are formed, and how they affect the understanding—and also the teaching and learning—of English in Japan. Notions like: "we Japanese are poor language learners, and in fact can't really do it," or "the incursions English has made into the Japanese language are a serious threat to it," as well as the vague associations of English with internationalism, cosmopolitanism, opportunity, aspiration, and power are clearly all significant factors in the Japanese attitude toward English. Seargeant's book puts meat on the bones of the intuitions many of us have had about the status of English in Japan.

Compartments is another excursion into the quietly, rationally, fantastic world of Zoran Živković. The title story is a fine example of a method he employs in this book and also in others, most notably Four Stories Till the End: the use of a sort of theme and variations structure. The protagonist in "Compartments," on a train, moves from one compartment to the next, and in each has encounters that parallel—but don't entirely mirror—those he has in other compartments, and each of the encounters is delightfully odd, delightfully skewed, so we move, with Živković and his character down the train. The other stories in the collection are also fascinating and fine. Kudos to Kurodahan Press for making this very interesting Serbian writer available.

A man is waiting in a cell, in a hospital room, in a hotel room, in an elevator. People visit the room and tell him stories; the stories in each tale parallel stories in other tales. Thus, in Four Stories Till the End, Zoran Živković again plays his theme and variations, and as should be the case with this format, each variation enriches the others, but is also worth reading on its own, as is each of the tales contained in these variations. This is fantasy that is kept from the facile by the rigorous form into which Živković binds it.

#88: I knew my local library would not have it, but I checked about Four Stories Till the End anyway. It sounds intriguing.

The Živković sounds very interesting. Thanks.

It's Kurodahan Press, located in Kyushu, that has made the Živković books available. Kurodahan is an enterprising little concern, one that, if you feel you'd like to get your hands on Živković's books, are well worth supporting. (I love libraries, but in some cases, if readers can afford to do so, it is, I believe, a good thing to throw some money in the direction of small presses.)

This is an account of a journey Ella K. Maillart, an extraordinary traveler at a time when travel to far-off places was still an adventure, took with Peter Fleming (his account of the same trip, News from Tartary: A Journey from Peking to Kashmir is also excellent). She's a less polished writer than Fleming, but her perspective is different enough from his that Forbidden Journey is a welcome counterpoint. One misses his British stiff-upper-lippedness, but one senses that she is the tougher of the two, and enjoys her spunk. Maillart's experience reminds us that women were, as long ago as the 1930s, setting out on awe-inspiring adventures. She is a paragon not only for women (why isn't her work taken up by presses like Virago?), but, indeed for humanity as a whole.

Because anarchist feminist lesbian science fiction is not exactly thick on the ground, and because the book wasn't at all bad, one wants to praise L. Timmel Duchamp's Renegade, the second volume of her Marq'ssan Cycle, unreservedly, but the truth is there were moments when I wasn't sure I would stick out this 600 plus page novel, or, if I did manage to do so, whether I would carry on with the series. Having finished Renegade, though I can't say it lived up to the promise of Alanya to Alanya, the first book in the cycle, I think I will—with a break to read some other stuff—persevere. I will do so in the hope that less of the novel will take place in a prison cell deep in the heart of a fortified mountain, and that more attention will be given to the social and political organization of the free zone. And I will also hope that, as Duchamp moves on in the series she becomes, at the sentence level, a more fastidious stylist.

I won't be rushing to pick that up, but I think you've described the pros and cons very well!

1. Bluets by Maggie Nelson is a series of numbered entries all circling around the color blue and all that is associated with the color blue.

2. The discrete pieces do form a coherent, if oblique, narrative.

3. Because the narrative is more oblique than coherent one wants to read Bluets again almost immediately upon finishing it.

8. Resonance is more important than continuity, how the pieces interact with each other, rather than how they follow one another.

47. One could have done without the stuff out of a steamy romantic / erotic novel. It wasn't bad, just unnecessary.

62. The book ends, "All right then, let me try to rephrase. When I was alive, I aimed to be a student not of longing but of light."

138. That Maggie Nelson's "principal suppliers" are Ludwig Wittgenstein and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe is reassuring.

208. Maggie Nelson's Bluets is worth rereading, more than once, which is to say: it is worth reading.

240. The book begins: "Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color. Suppose I were to speak this as though it were a confession; suppose I shredded my napkin as we spoke. It began slowly. An appreciation, an affinity. Then, one day, it became more serious. Then (looking into an empty teacup, its bottom stained with thin brown excrement coiled into the shape of a sea horse) it became somehow personal."

#95: That one intrigues me. Thanks for the review and recommendation, David. I will look for the book.

Everybody knows Black Jack: that's true if everybody is defined as "Japanese male between the age of 13 and 40." Everybody should know Black Jack—the freelance surgeon who features in the series created by Osamu Tezuka. The stories in this anthology (the eleventh volume in the series, my introduction to the physician-genius) are cracking good reads, and are made even more exciting by Tezuka's art. One sees why masters such as Yoshihiro Tatsumi viewed Tezuka as their master.

2666, Roberto Bolaño's magnum opus, is a masterpiece. In it he gives us material which lesser writers might have been satisfied to market as five different, lesser, novels, but which Bolaño skillfully and successfully weaves into one, the five parts of which resonate with each other to create magnificent harmonies, and even greater dissonances. 2666 is a massive reflection on evil and art and women and murder and Mexico and the holocaust and many other facets of the chaos we call life. It is rare that novels as ambitious as Bolaño's are even attempted in our time. It is rarer still that they are successful. 2666 is successful, perhaps even perfect. Along with Oe's Changeling, I am certain it will be one of my books of the year.

Like everybody else I've been hearing good things about Henning Mankell's Kurt Wallander series for a couple of years now. I happened upon a used copy of the first in the set, Faceless Killers, a couple of days ago, and having finished it, I am now a convert. This is just what one wants a crime novel to be. I will definitely keep an eye out for other Wallander books, and who knows, perhaps I'll indulge in other authors of whom the Scandinavian thriller boom has made me aware. Steig Larsson here I come?

I bought Faceless Killers a while back and still need to get it read. Thanks for the reminder, David.

Alamut is a historical novel in which the Slovenian writer, Vladimir Bartol, gives us a fictionalized version of the rise of Hasan-i Sabbah, the old man of the mountain, who, using hashish, beautiful young women, and the faith (and lust) of true believers, manages to shake Seljuk supremacy in eleventh-century Iran. The novel was published in 1938, and has been taken as an allegory of the rise of fascists in Italy and Germany, and of Stalin in the USSR. More recently, in the wake of 9/11, it has been taken as prophetic. It is effective as both allegory and as commentary on more recent events, but first and foremost it is literature: a well-constructed adventure novel set in exotic times and places.

I read Alamut earlier this year and was very impressed with it. Glad to see there's another fan.

I have had Alamut in the BlackHole since Deborah read it. I just need the local library to get a copy!

Because he is so often compared to James Ellroy, and because Ellroy seems to like his books so much, I was a bit hesitant to read David Peace. I was afraid that, like Ellroy's, Peace's prose would be overly-mannered. It was a relief to discover that Peace's work, though it does teeter, at times, on the thin line that separates the stylish from the mannered, generally ends up on the right side of that divide. One of his primary strategies is repetition. When that doesn't work, one skims. At other times, however, the repetitions create a rhythm that drives the high-powered narrative relentlessly forward. Peace gets full marks, too, for conveying just how horrible life must have been in Japan in the years just after World War II. Tokyo Year Zero is an atmospheric thriller, stylistically ambitious, and well-grounded in history. As Ellroy's career proceeded, his mannerisms got the better of him, rendering him, eventually, unreadable. I hope, as I continue with the Tokyo Trilogy, I don't find the same malady infecting David Peace.

Regarding Alamut knowing that the Ismailis were ultimately routed by the Mongols—an event that, of course, the characters in Bartol's book couldn't anticipate—somehow, in an Ozymandias sort of way, makes reading the novel more poignant.

The Dogs of Riga is the second of the Kurt Wallander mysteries. I finished it on a transpacific flight yesterday, and, though I liked it somewhat less than the first, I continue to enjoy the series. Appealing are Kurt Wallander's haplessness and gloom, qualities that are useful counterpoints to his skill as a police officer and the humanity that allows him to appreciate opera, women (though he invariably has bad luck with them), whiskey, and friendship. It is, I think, Henning Mankell's skillful characterizations that make these novels so readable. I will continue with the series.

Opera, it needs hardly be said, is over the top, and that's why we love it—some of us, anyway. If that excessive aesthetic appeals to you then so will James McCourt's Mawrdew Czgowchwz (pronounced Mardu Gorgeous), a campy, funny, fun, novel written with, as it were, all the stops pulled out. Wayne Koestenbaum (who tends to write similarly operatic over-the top criticism) gets it right in the introduction when he says: "To call Mawrdew Czgowhwz the great novel of the opera queen is less accurate than to call it the great novel of the gay virtuoso gabber." He intends this, of course, as a compliment. (I'll only add that Koestenbaum is perspicacious in his inclusion of "game-show stalwart" Charles Nelson Reilly among the gifted gabbers.) Not a great reader of Firbank and company this is not the sort of book I'd want for a daily diet, but when I'm in the mood for a lashing of exotic spice . . . yes, it's just right.

I've had Richard Hughes's A High Wind in Jamaica on my shelf for decades, one of those books I'd heard enough good about that I picked up a cheap used copy, but wasn't quite excited enough about to actually read. That changed, partly thanks to the buzz around the new NYRB edition ( I read it in an old Perennial Classic), and I'm glad it did. This is a story that works on every level: an adventure story and an satire on the conventions of adventure stories; a work in which each sentence is a gem; a work in which the insights about childhood are astute, and, though the book was published in 1928 (or *because* the book was published in 1928) much more realistic about youngsters than is the norm today. The humor is by turns dry and wacky, and works in both registers. In short, the only negative I can come up with about A High Wind in Jamaica is that it is too short.

#108: That is a book that has been in the BlackHole far too long. Thanks for the reminder, David.

>108 dcozy:: I've read A High Wind in Jamaica twice and enjoyed it both times. So much so that, a couple of years ago I put in for an Early Reviewer copy of his In Hazard. I was rather disappointed in it and have decided that perhaps there's a reason he's famous for just one book? *smile*

Yes, thanks for that reminder; I'll have to get to A High Wind in Jamaica early next year.

Chimako Tada's Forest of Eyes is simply a superb collection of poetry. Tada works in a wide range of styles, including some that are unusual in Japanese verse such as the prose-poem. One may prefer certain things she does to others, but will be astounded at how much she does brilliantly. Even forms that one may have thought exhausted such as the haiku and the tanka are revivified. This is a poetry collection that keeps one turning pages. We want to see how Tada will astound us next.

Having read Jacques Roubaud, one inevitably wants to know more about his wife, Alix Cleo Roubaud. In giving us Alix's Journal, Dalkey Archive has scratched that itch, but the journals would be a compelling read even if one were unaware of Jacques's achievements. Not only was Alix a troubled, sickly, tormented young woman. She was a troubled, sickly, tormented young woman who could write, and her reflections on art, photography, books, marriage, and, inevitably, her addictions, neuroses, and doubts are fascinating, not least when the form they take seems influenced by the poets who surrounded her and who she was—in addition to a steady diet of crime novels—reading.

#113: Well, I will admit that I have never heard of either Jacques or Alix Roubaud, so I am now off to the library to see if it has any of their books. . .

If you tackle Jacques, be ready for something completely different. Like Alix, he's published by Dalkey Archive.

#115: My local library only has one of his books, Some Thing Black, and nothing of hers.

I don't know Some Thing Black; poetry, perhaps? Alix did not, I believe, publish anything in her lifetime.

I'm editing this post to add this information I just found about it: http://www.complete-review.com/reviews/oulipo/roubaud2.htm

Regina Marler's Bloomsbury Pie: The Making of the Bloomsbury Boom is an excellent blow-by-blow of how a group of writers, artists, and intellectuals became an object of fascination for so many and for so many different reasons. Marler takes us up through about 1997, so she doesn't discuss Michael Cunningham's The Hours: A Novel, or the film that was based on it, but the boom, no doubt, boomed again in the wake of those productions. She describes some Bloomsbury fans as "luxuriating in a world of inverted values, where friendship, books, and art take precedence over the daily business of moneymaking." I luxuriate with them.

#117: Thanks for sharing the link, David.

#118: I will look for that one as well. I read a book earlier this year on the Bloomsbury group, but it read more like an academic treatise. Perhaps Marler's book will be a better one.

Charlie Huston's Six Bad Things is not at all bad, though by the end, after the umpteenth shoot-out, massacre, and hair's-breadth escape the thriller came to seem more of a slog than a thrill. The pages do turn, though, and are helped along by Huston's humor and skill at caricature. Upon finishing the book I realized that it is the second volume of a trilogy. I won't go out of my way to find one and three, but, if I were trapped in an airport with nothing to read, and happened to see a Huston on the rack I'd certainly reach for it before any DaVinci nonsense; Eat, Pray, Puke; or much of the rest of what would likely be on offer.

(This is the second book I've read electronically. The first was on an iPod Touch, this one on an iPhone 4. The experience this time was, as was the case the first time I tried it, okay, but I still can't imagine reading, on the small screen, anything more challenging than a thriller.)

One thing that sets Henning Mankell's thrillers apart from other police procedurals is that Mankell's always leave the mean Skåne streets for foreign parts: Riga in the second in the series, and South Africa in the third, The White Lioness, to offer two examples. Globalization is a reality; police and those who write about them have to deal with it. Having said that, though, I'm sure happy when I see that I've hit a section of the book that's going to be restricted to, if not Skåne, then at least to Inspector Wallander's homeland, Sweden. It wouldn't break my heart it Mankell focused on his home country a bit more than he does. Still, the Wallander books are extremely well-done entertainments. I will return to the series.

Between major novels Thomas Pynchon seems to enjoy producing lighter works, but it would be a mistake to think that these lighter works, such as Vineland and Inherent Vice, are less packed with pleasure than anything else he's written. There is not a page in Inherent Vice, for example, that doesn't, at least once, but usually more often, bring a grin to one's face. It's Pynchon's skill with sentences, his exuberant imagination, the erudite scaffolding that supports the high jinks, but most of all the laugh out loud humor that does it. And that all of this is in service of an elegy to the idealism, and good spirits and good fun of the sixties, only adds to the pleasure. This may actually be the great novel of the greater Los Angeles sprawl in the long 1960s.

I've been thinking for ages about whether or not to read Inherent Vice. I love all of Pynchon's earlier works, but did not like Mason & Dixon, and couldn't even finish Vineland, so I wonder whether I am just done with him. But your little comment makes me think yes, I should try it.

At a time when paintings were big, emotional, and abstract Donald Evans chose small—the size of postage stamps—nuanced, and precise. Not only were his works postage-stamp-size, they were, in fact, postage stamps, though the countries that issued these stamps—Domino, Banana, Amis and Amants, Sung Ting and others—will not be found on conventional maps. Created by Evans, the stamps were part of the imagined world from which Evans's stamps arose; they were rectangles, squares, and triangles brimming with enough wit and beauty to keep one looking for hours. Joseph Cornell and Evans would have had much to say to each other.

Jacques Roubaud is the Proust of our time. If this was not clear in The Great Fire of London, the first branch of the project of which both it and The Loop are a part, then it is now, with this work that focuses more narrowly on his childhood years before and during the occupation of France and continuing until a bit after the liberation. Translator Jeff Fort, in his brilliant afterword to the book, quotes Roubad: "The great fire of London is a treatise on memory written in imitation of a novel." It is, Roubaud says elsewhere (also quoted by Fort), "a treatise, or treatment, of a reflective experience of memory." Memory and consciousness in general, do not, of course, take us down paths clearly demarcated and straight: thus, in part, the form of Roubaud's work: the fact that one must read it with at least two bookmarks in play, to help one avoid getting lost as one moves among the chapters, the insertions, and the bifurcations that make up the work. That Roubaud is able to write in a manner equally riveting about his memories, and about memory marks him out as a master. Kudos to Dalkey Archive for publishing the first two branches of this monumental work. One hopes they, in collaboration with Jeff Fort, will bring the remaining four branches into English. (A side note: All the best books I have read this year have been translations: from Japanese, from Spanish, and from French. Literary translators: Thank you!)

#125: A side note: All the best books I have read this year have been translations: from Japanese, from Spanish, and from French. Literary translators: Thank you!

David, you might be interested in a book that Darryl (kidzdoc) recommended earlier this year: Why Translation Matters by Edith Grossman.

The 1918 Pilgrimage of Takamure Itsue is Takamure's account, orignally a series of newspaper articles, about her experience of the Shikoku pilgrimage. Takamure, it seems grew up to become an interesting and remarkable woman. She became a pioneering feminist scholar, one whose work remains controversial; also, according to translator Susan Tennant, she grew up to be an anarchist. At the time of the pilgrimage, though, she was twenty-four years old, and seems not significantly more impressive than any other well-read, hyper-sensitive, self-conscious young person. Like such young people, her memoir is at times charming, and at times tiresome. Tennant's attempt to place Takamure with writer/travelers such as Isabella Bird and Alexandra David Neel seems a bit of a reach.

#127: I think I will pass on that one.

The villain in this, the best of Henning Mankell's thrillers that I have read, is a capitalist who on the one hand is a great philanthropist, on the other a trafficker in organs ripped out of the bodies of murdered poor people. He is, therefore, a caricature of the capitalism in which most of us are implicated. Mankell's treatment of this dark theme is flawless, and the work is made stronger, I believe, for the limits he has placed on its geographical scope. In The Man Who Smiled Wallander never gets out of Scandinavia--no jaunts to Latvia or South Africa--and the gloom of the Northern winter is compelling.

I have really got to get to Mankell's books!

Some Years ago the English author Richard Rayner wrote a book about Los Angeles that was almost unique in that it was paean to a city that most people love to trash. Now, in A Bright and Guilty Place, Rayner considers the other side of the metropolis that has become his home. He sums it up in his subtitle as: "murder, corruption, and L.A.'s scandalous coming of age." He reminds those of us who may have forgotten what a corrupt place Los Angeles was in the 1920s and 1930s, and makes us pause, when we remember, for example, the Rampart Scandal of the late '90s, to wonder how much—how little—has changed

David, the 2011 group is up and running. I do hope you will join us again: http://www.librarything.com/groups/75booksin20111

As bleak and cynical as they come, and as lovely, atmospheric, and artful, Total Chaos is crime fiction at it's best. Jean-Claude Izzo gives us Marseilles in all its squalor, but also all its beauty, the friction of different peoples rubbing up against each other, but also the pleasure that comes with such contact. The joy Izzo takes from his city, even as he never ignores its sordid side, is a privilege to share.

Jean Claude Izzo is the Raymond Chandler of Marseilles, a city as complex and corrupt as the Los Angeles Chandler wrote about. To say that he is as good as Chandler is high praise, and true, but one hastens to add that without Chandler there could be no Izzo. Very much in the tradition Chandler invented, he is a worthy successor to the master, and anyone not absolutely repelled by crime novels, by honesty, by beauty, should explore these novels now. Chourmo is as good as Total Chaos, and i'm sure Solea will be equally gripping.

Jean-Claude Izzo's Marseilles Trilogy ends, in Solea as it must: masterfully, beautifully, and darkly, a darkness contrasted with the sunlit Southern world whose pleasures—and the threats to those pleasures—that Izzo and his protagonist, Fabio Montale, understand so well.