Book 323: Amsterdam

 

“As far as the welfare of every other living form on earth was concerned, the human project was not just a failure, it was a mistake from the very beginning.”

Dates read: June 25-27, 2019

Rating: 6/10

Lists: Booker Prize, The New York Times best-seller

Few things are more satisfying than boiling hot self-righteousness. If there's a drug that gives you that feeling of someone else being not just incorrect, but morally wrong, and being about to shove it in their face that you're a better person than they are, please no one tell me. I will become an addict. Of course, we all know that it is almost inevitably followed by realizing that you are not quite in fact as heroic as you felt, nor is the other person the literal spawn of Satan. But it's a heady rush while it lasts.

Even long-standing friendships aren't immune from misunderstanding and resentments. In Ian McEwan's Amsterdam, two old friends meet at the funeral of a woman they each had loved once. But it isn't the free-spirited Molly, now gone after a brief but terrible bout of dementia, that drives apart Vernon, the editor of a struggling London newspaper, and Clive, a respected composer. They've long since come to terms with that part of their lives. Neither of them can much understand what she ever saw in another one of her former lovers, who also attends the funeral: Julian, a conservative politician whose policy stances would seem to be anathema to Molly's guiding principles of love and acceptance. Nor can they understand why she married George, who seemed bent on controlling her and molding her into conventional respectability. Like many friends, Vernon and Clive have gone through cycles of being more or less close over the years, and the funeral pushes them back into each other's orbit. Spooked by the circumstances of Molly's death, each promises that if the other were to be in a similar state of decline, they would help the end come quicker.

Not long afterwards, both men find themselves in a position to have to make a moral choice. Vernon is given photographs that Molly took of Julian during their relationship...photos that his support base would find shocking. These photos would solidify Vernon's position at the paper by boosting circulation and catapult him into the spotlight after a lifetime of toiling away in relative obscurity. Clive has received a prestigious government commission to compose a piece to celebrate the millennium, and struggles for inspiration until, when taking a hike while out of town, he sees a man attack a woman on the trail. Finding himself suddenly able to see where he wants his symphony to go, he ignores the situation and doesn't report what he saw to the police. Clive is aghast that Vernon would even consider publishing the photos of someone else's private, intimate moments. Vernon is insistent that Clive report what he saw and face responsibility for his failure to intervene on behalf of the woman and keeping what he witnessed from law enforcement. The two are bitterly estranged.

This book is so short as to practically be a novella. That doesn't limit the impact of McEwan's satire, though. If you have ever known a pompous middle-aged man, Vernon and Clive are pitch-perfect. Both ruminate on the clarity of the situation facing the other, while running themselves ragged in the mental gymnastics required to justify their own choices. Each can only see the ways in which they themselves have been good, devoted friends, while the other has taken advantage of their generosity. But that's kind of one of the issues: character. While obviously something this brief and with this perspective isn't out for a deep character study, Vernon and Clive are basically the same person. And George, who shows up to create havoc throughout, seems more like a plot device than a human. I never found anyone compelling enough to really care about how it would end up.

How it ends up is a little too tidy and convenient, for that matter. And the pacing is odd...it drags and feels bloated (despite its brevity) in places, but the conclusion feels rushed. It's not without its clever moments and witty turns of phrase, but it really feels like an excellent short story concept that got padded into a decent-but-unspectacular short novel. It's worth a try (the upside of having such a low page count is that even if it doesn't work, it shouldn't take long to finish), but there are sharper, funnier satires out there. 

One year ago, I was reading: The Eyre Affair

Two years ago, I was reading: The Year of Reading Dangerously

Three years ago, I was reading: Daisy Jones & The Six

Four years ago, I was reading: My Name is Venus Black

Five years ago, I was reading: Nefertiti

Six years ago, I was reading: The Namesake

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Book 323: Amsterdam

Book 317: Midnight's Children

"Does one error invalidate the entire fabric? Am I so far gone, in my desperate need for meaning, that I'm prepared to distort everything—to re-write the whole history of my times purely in order to place myself in a central role? Today, in my confusion, I can't judge. I'll have to leave it to others. For me, there can be no going back; I must finish what I've started, even if, inevitably, what I finish turns out not to be what I began..."

Dates read: May 20-29, 2019

Rating: 8/10

Lists/awards: Booker Prize, Time's All-Time 100 Novels

I have many issues with how history is taught in public schools, but one of the biggest is how little time gets spent on the Eastern hemisphere. Lots of America, obviously, but outside of learning about the Fertile Crescent and Ancient Egypt again and again and again, we don't get into much besides Europe. I have to imagine that most countries focus heavily on themselves and their immediate neighbors when they study the past, but some of the oldest, richest civilizations in the world are on the other side of the globe and we barely study them! I wish it were otherwise, but sadly I am not in charge of things.

The more books I read set in India, the more I wish I had a firm grasp of modern Indian history. Indian independence, and the partition that followed, continue to resonate not just in literature, but on a global political scale. Salman Rushdie explores these momentous events through his Booker Prize-winning epic, Midnight's Children. The novel tells the story of Saleem Sinai, born at the moment India begins post-colonial self-rule, and tracks his life as it, and his country, develop. But its more ambitious even than that: it begins with his grandparents and their youth, then tells the story of his own parents, and only then turns its full attention to its own protagonist.

Saleem is born to Ahmed and Amina Sinai, well-off Muslims living in Bombay, at exactly midnight on the day the British officially surrender the country, at the same moment as another child, a Hindu boy called Shiva. It turns out there are 1,001 children born in that first hour of India's modern life, and each of them have a gift, a magical power...and the closer to midnight, the stronger that power is. Saleem doesn't discover his until he is nine, when he begins to hear voices in his head: those of the other "children of midnight", who can speak to not only him but each other as he psychically hosts them. He eventually loses this power, but develops the ability to smell the feelings of other people. As he continues to grow, his fate (along with those of his parents and his little sister Jamila, called "The Brass Monkey" as a child for her hair color) is tied to that of his homeland.

There's much, much more than that, of course. Even attempting a brief outline of the twists and turns of Rushdie's tremendously complicated plot (and enormous cast of characters) would take several paragraphs. It's truly a stunningly ambitious novel, and what's even more stunning is that it mostly pulls it off. Characters come and go organically, storylines are fully developed and have solid payoffs. Rushdie writes the story to be narrated by Saleem himself to a female companion from roughly the modern day (when the book was written), and superbly uses that technique to frame it and give it momentum. It's deep, and rich, and beautifully written and constructed.

While it is undisputedly a masterwork, though, I don't know that I actually loved it as much as I respect it. Part of that is that I simply don't have enough context for it. Even as an educated person, my understanding of modern Indian history is thin and this book is the kind that requires a higher level of knowledge to really comprehend everything that it's doing. And while Rushdie mostly maintains the plot's progression nimbly despite the text's density, by the end there have been just so many characters and the scope is so vast that I found myself a little burned out and ready for it to end. It is not a book that should be read in snippets here and there, it demands and requires full and sustained bouts of attention. If you're ready to read a modern classic that's going to need a lot from you as a reader and reward the work you put into it, I'd highly recommend it. If you're looking for something on the easier side, though, leave this one until you're really ready to sink your teeth into something. 

One year ago, I was reading: The Satanic Verses

Two years ago, I was reading: Native Speaker

Three years ago, I was reading: The Winter of the Witch

Four years ago, I was reading: Ghost Wars

Five years ago, I was reading: American Heiress

Six years ago, I was reading: The Serpent King

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Book 317: Midnight's Children

Book 274: The Gathering

"I have all my regrets between pouring the wine and reaching for the glass."

Dates read: November 7-11, 2018

Rating: 5/10

Lists/awards: Booker Prize, 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die (2012 edition)

It's weird what I do and don't remember from my childhood. There are moments that stand out in my mind clearly, the feeling of swinging on the swingset at home and launching myself into the air, of jumping on the trampoline, of the stinging black flies on the shores of Lake Superior. And then there are things that I know happened but I couldn't provide a clear recollection of if you paid me. And then there are some in-between, neither clearly recalled nor completely blank, that almost feel like memories out of dreams. Did they actually happen? Was I just told about them so many times I feel like the memory is my own now? Or did I just make them up playing pretend and they stuck?

Human memory is deeply fallible. Being a psychology major who went to law school, I was and continue to be horrified at the credibility of eyewitness testimony. We think of memories as files in a cabinet or videos that can be played on demand, but in actuality they're as malleable as clay. The unreliability of memory is key to Anne Enright's The Gathering. In it, Veronica Hegarty is reuniting with her large family in Ireland for the funeral of one of her many siblings...Liam, with whom Veronica was particularly close. She meditates on her current unhappiness while also trying to figure out her brother's, who died from alcoholism, and to what extent the way their lives have turned out is rooted in a hazy memory from their childhood.

To explain what might have happened, Veronica spins stories about her grandparents. She does not know to what extent any of them might be true, but she's desperate to explain the complex bonds between them that might shed light on what occurred later, when she and Liam were living with them. In the meantime, her own marriage is struggling to survive, and going back home and dealing with all of her relatives again further stresses her. It's a portrait of a woman at a loss, trapped in her own ruminations, needing a path forward but (to borrow a line) borne back ceaselessly into the past.

Anyone who's wondered if we can ever really escape from ourselves and our pasts will appreciate Enright's work here. Her language is lush and evocative, and Veronica's struggle to understand her family history and her own life is rendered powerfully. That feeling of childhood memory, the way the details get harder to recall the more we try, and the challenge of trying to extract meaning from it is also captured poignantly. Veronica's heartache feels real, wanting neither to fall into the easy trap of blaming everything on family but unable to figure out how much blame to assign where.

While I appreciated aspects of Enright's craft, I did not like this book. It's often confusing to read, moving back and forth in time without clarity. When we're introduced to Veronica's imaginings about her grandparents' early lives, it's not clear until later on that these are rooted in nothing more than her own imagination. And while I'm no prude, I have never read a book so fixated on describing erections in my life and hope I never do again. While it kind of made sense, based on what's revealed over time, it was awkward and honestly unnecessary. It took me out of the book entirely. And although it's less than 300 pages long, the book honestly feels like it's been puffed out and was in real need of editing. Usually the Booker is a good list for me in terms of books I'm likely to enjoy reading, but this one just did nothing at all for me. I do not recommend it.

One year ago, I was reading: We Are Our Brains

Two years ago, I was reading: Going Clear

Three years ago, I was reading: Good Omens

Four years ago, I was reading: Die A Little

Five years ago, I was reading: The Good Earth

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Book 274: The Gathering

Book 262: The Luminaries

"But there is no truth except truth in relation, and heavenly relation is composed of wheels in motion, tilting axes, turning dials; it is a clockwork orchestration that alters every minute, never repeating, never still."

Dates read: September 13-22, 2018

Rating: 9/10

Lists/awards: Booker Prize

I am usually a fairly smart, rational human, but ever since I was a kid I've been super into astrology. I know, I know, the idea that where the stars are in the sky has literally anything to do with what kind of person I am is silly. But we all have our weird, kind-of woo-woo things, right? Some people believe in ghosts, some people believe in the power of positive energy, and I not-entirely-but-more-than-I-should believe in astrology.

Eleanor Catton's Booker Prize-winning novel The Luminaries, is many things. It's a depiction of life in a gold-rush-era town in New Zealand. It's a story about families. It's a mystery. It's several mysteries, each unspooling at its own pace. And true to its title, it takes inspiration from the moon (each chapter is shorter than the one proceeding it, meant as a reference to the waning of the moon) and the planets/stars (some characters are based on astrological signs, others to the typical traits associated with the planets). It begins when a Scottish lawyer named Walter Moody arrives in the small town of Hokitika to make his fortune as a prospector. The ship on which he arrived, the Godspeed, was wrecked and he has to make his way ashore without his trunk. He decides to spend his time in the Crown Hotel while he waits for the wreck to be plunged and his belongings to be recovered, and shortly after he arrives, he manages to find himself in the bar of the hotel with twelve men who are clearly all gathered for a purpose. He manages to draw out from them a strange tale of several tragedies and mysteries that all seem to have happened at about the same time.

Shortly before Moody's arrival, a local politician, Alistair Lauderback, arrives in town to stump for votes. On the outskirts of town, he arrives at the cabin of a recluse, Crosbie Wells, and finds the man very recently deceased. And then, on the same night, a lucky young prospector, Emery Staines, goes missing, and a prostitute, Anna Wetherell, publicly overdoses on the opium to which she is addicted and is imprisoned. Each of the men in the bar of the Crown Hotel has a little piece of the story, and even more develops as time goes on. Bit by bit, the full story in all its beauty and tragedy is revealed, connecting the threads of each seemingly-separate piece together.

This is a big, ambitious novel that requires a lot of attention to keep the characters and their relationships with each other in mental order. In lesser hands, it would be confusing, but Catton keeps it engaging, requiring enough consideration to feel compelled to really focus on the book without making it feel like studying. The characters are complex and interesting, and the tangled web of their interactions with each other keep the tension from slacking. Indeed, for such a long book, it keeps itself going remarkably well, a testament to Catton's skill with prose and plotting. The way the layers of the mysteries the book presents are gradually peeled back and revealed is gratifying, feeling like tiny rewards doled out along the way until the end. The themes of loneliness, the role of chance, truth and lies, and revenge all come in and out of focus throughout, each feeling like it's given time and space to develop without being unduly flogged. For me, it was a wonderful book. It's hard to strike the balance between "passively entertaining" and "too much information management required to properly enjoy", but The Luminaries was right in the sweet spot. I got lost in it.

Now that I've just gushed about it, it does have some issues. It's a slow starter, taking advantage of its prodigious length to stretch the story out perhaps more than really necessary. Some characters feel like they get the short shrift and if Catton was less wedded to her astrology conceit, should have been cut. The way Catton reveals a bunch of pertinent information right at the end of the book in flashback, almost like a coda after the "real" ending of the story, does feel a little too cute by half. But honestly, those are mostly nitpicks. I'm not the sort to wish that a book would never end (I'm always excited about something on the horizon), but I did close it with a satisfied sigh and think "what a great book". It's not something to read when you're looking for something breezy and light, but otherwise, I highly highly recommend it. 

One year ago, I was reading: The Sisters of Henry VIII

Two years ago, I was reading: Once Upon a River

Three years ago, I was reading: The Lady Elizabeth

Four years ago, I was reading: Seating Arrangements

Five years ago, I was reading: All The King's Men

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Book 262: The Luminaries

Book 246: Disgrace

"A risk to own anything: a car, a pair of shoes, a packet of cigarettes. Not enough to go around, not enough cars, shoes, cigarettes. Too many people, too few things. What there is must go into circulation, so that everyone can have a chance to be happy for a day. That is the theory; hold to the theory and the comforts of theory. Not human evil, just a vast circulatory system, to whose workings pity and terror are irrelevant. That is how one must see life in this country: in its schematic aspect. Otherwise one could go mad. Cars, shoes; women too. There must be some niche in the system for women and what happens to them."

Dates read: July 2-5, 2018

Rating: 8/10

Lists/Awards: Booker Prize, 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die (2012)

Once upon a time, it seemed, there was a kind of script for powerful men who got caught behaving badly around women. There would be a statement full of vague, none-too-sincere seeming apologies for their actions and crocodile tears. There would be a trip to rehab, usually for "sex addiction" but sometimes for substances if they'd blamed that for their misdeeds. There would be an announcement of some sort of charitable contribution, often money but sometimes actual volunteer work if they wanted to really put on a show. They'd go away for a while, 6 months or a year. Then there would be a sit-down interview on a broadcast network where they talked about how much they'd changed and how they couldn't even recognize the person they used to be. The interviewer would lob softball questions designed to elicit sympathy. Then back to business as usual.

Then came Harvey Weinstein and #MeToo. You could see Harvey trying to trot out the old familiar playbook, disappearing to sex rehab. But it didn't work. The failure of the established pattern is also at issue in J.M. Coetzee's Booker Prize-winning Disgrace, except in this case it's because the man in question specifically refuses to use it. David Lurie is a white professor at a university in Cape Town in post-apartheid South Africa. A frustrated scholar of the Romantic literary tradition, interest in his classes has dwindled and he finds himself teaching Communications. He's an unhappy man, twice divorced and mostly uninterested in developing actual relationships with other people. On a whim, he decides to pursue a beautiful student in one of his classes. They sleep together a few times, all at David's initiation and at least once when he's aware that she doesn't actually want to. Suddenly her boyfriend shows up in class, and shortly thereafter he finds himself accused of misconduct against her.

He's offered the standard-issue response: an apology, counseling, a break, but an eventual return assured. He refuses, simply capitulating, and leaves Cape Town for the countryside, where his daughter Lucy owns and runs a small farm. No sooner does he get somewhat accustomed to life there, though, than an episode of violence changes things forever. Three young black men attack David and Lucy, attempting to burn him and gang-raping her. The already-strained relationship between father and daughter becomes even more tense as both try to cope with their trauma in different ways.

It's obvious fairly early on that the characters and situations aren't intended to be always read as strictly realistic. There's a lot of allegory going on here about apartheid and the wounds that it left and the violence that was a crucial part of that system continuing to resonate. I found myself wishing I had more background in the history of South Africa, because I felt like there were layers and layers of meaning and some of them were out of my grasp. Disgrace is a fairly short book, not even 250 pages, but there is a lot going on in it because Coetzee is an absolutely master of his craft. Every word of this book was obviously carefully, deliberately chosen and he evokes so much by just letting his plot and characters speak for themselves. And speaking of characters, such a sticking point for me as a reader, this was a strange experience in that I didn't find anyone especially compelling but still found the book as a whole to be something that I was invested in.

So what I'm saying is that this is a very good book, but reader be warned: it is bleak. It is a story about a terrible person, who does some awful things. You almost wonder if he deserves it on some level, but even worse things happen to his daughter and she's just trying to live on her little piece of land and doesn't seem at first blush to be culpable. Or is she? Are all of those who benefit from systemic inequality culpable? There is a note of hope at the end with the promise of the birth of a biracial child, clearly meant to be symbolic of the way forward, but honestly using a child who will also be the offspring of a violent rape of a lesbian woman to represent that hope is extremely cynical. This is a high quality book that I appreciated the experience of reading and am glad I read and have no plans to ever return to because it was hard. I would definitely recommend it, but go in expecting a downer (and be aware that there's violence toward animals/animal death in case you're sensitive to it).

One year ago, I was reading: Bright Boulevard, Bold Dreams

Two years ago, I was reading: The Informant

Three years ago, I was reading: Charity Girl

Four years ago, I was reading: A Passage to India

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Book 246: Disgrace

Book 218: Possession

"Vocabularies are crossing circles and loops. We are defined by the lines we choose to cross or be confronted by."

Dates read: March 21-25, 2018

Rating: 8/10

Lists/awards: Booker Prize, Time's All-Time 100 Novels

When you learn a second language, one of the first verbs you usually learn (after "to be" and "to do") is "to have". It's a fiendishly tricky beast to work your way around how it's used in various languages, not in the least because it's so broadly used in English. You can have tangible things, like a dog. Intangible ones, like a cold. You can "have" relationships. You can "have" a fight with the person you're in a relationship with. English, it seems, is hung up on the idea of having.

Many of the various kinds of having come into play in A.S. Byatt's Booker Prize-winning Possession. Young British scholar Roland Mitchell has a dead-end, barely-paying job doing research work for a university literature professor, who specializes in a (fictional) Victorian-era poet called Randolph Ash. While paging through one of Ash's books at the library one day, he finds two drafts of a letter to a woman that Ash met at a breakfast. Impulsively, he pockets them, and goes on a mission to discover who the woman was, and if the letter was ever even sent. He figures out quickly that it was, and its recipient was a fellow (fictional) poet called Christabel LaMotte...which leads him to Dr. Maud Bailey, who studies LaMotte.

The two then have a secret, as they try to uncover what might have passed between Ash and LaMotte without alerting Roland's boss, Maud's colleagues, or an avaricious American researcher who is constantly acquiring Ash memorabilia for his museum in New Mexico. That the two poets knew each other at all is new information, and as Maud and Roland discover more and more about how deep the connection ran, all of the knowledge that anyone "had" about them gets flipped on its head. And all along, Roland and Maud grow closer, which is problematic because Roland has a long-time girlfriend whose work supports them both, and Maud has issues of her own when it comes to relationships.

Despite their plot differences, I was reminded of nothing so much as The Name of the Rose while I read Possession. Both are rich reads, dense in the best possible sense of the word...the kind of thing that even while you're reading it, you know you'll get even more out of it the next time around. Byatt doesn't just include the main narrative, she supplements it with poems "by" the poets, "their" letters to each other, diaries from third parties. This must have been enormously difficult, to come up with distinct voices and styles for all of these characters, but it all fits in so smoothly it's hard to believe that this isn't all based on real people.

The mystery that Roland and Maud are trying to solve unwinds slowly but maintains tension...the delays that pop up feel organic and not just shoehorned in to pad page length. The characters are well-developed, and the way Byatt parallels their stories with those of the people they're researching is beautifully done. The prose is lively, despite its density, and the book moves faster than you think while you're reading it (partly because it's so absorbing). It's really an excellent book, one that I look forward to reading again one day. I highly recommend this, but beware: it's not light or easy reading, and deals with some emotionally turbulent subjects. Go in ready for something that will reward attention and move you, and (hopefully) you'll enjoy it!

One year ago, I was reading: Hausfrau

Two years ago, I was reading: Lost Horizon

Three years ago, I was reading: Marlena

Four years ago, I was reading: Creative Mythology

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Book 218: Possession

Book 207: The Sellout

"They say 'pimpin' ain't easy'. Well, neither is slaveholdin'. Like children, dogs, dice, and overpromising politicians, and apparently prostitutes, slaves don't do what you tell them to do. And when your eighty-some-odd-year-old black thrall has maybe fifteen good minutes of work in him in a day and enjoys the shit out of being punished, you don't get many of the plantation perks you see in the movies either."

Dates read: February 6-9, 2018

Rating: 6/10

Lists/awards: Booker Prize

Rating books is an inherently subjective task. We try to fool ourselves into thinking that we're able to judge them based on objective quality, but we're ultimately judging them on scales that are both personal and ever-shifting. Tastes change during our lives, and where I see a lyrically-written character-driven masterpiece, someone else might see a purple-prose-laden never-goes-anywhere snore. Some books "feel" better than they are because you read them at the right moment, and others get downgraded because it just wasn't the best time. Which is why I always believe in rating and reviewing even the books that didn't work for me, because hating something you've only seen positive reactions to can make you feel like you're out on a limb and reading someone else saying they didn't like it either can be a relief.

So I was just talking last week about Thank You For Smoking and how the humor really hit home for me and I really liked it. I'm not sure if it was that I ended up reading two satires in a row, or that I didn't connect the same way with the subject at hand, or if it was just not my thing, but The Sellout just never quite clicked for me. This story opens up with our unnamed narrator (we get the last name, Me, but unless I missed something we never got a first name) watching his case go through oral argument at the Supreme Court. His case? He owns a slave and has re-segregated the school in his outlying Los Angeles community of Dickens, which has recently literally been taken off the map. Did I mention our protagonist is black?

We go back in time to get Me's whole story, from being homeschooled by his father, who uses him as a subject in various psychological/sociological experiments in the oddball agricultural community of Dickens, to his childhood friendship with Hominy, a cast member of the Little Rascals (who later pledges himself to Me as a slave after Me saves his life, much to Me's chagrin), to his long-running crush on his beautiful neighbor Marpessa, who drives a city bus, to his eventual decision to pretend there's an all-white charter magnet school going in across the street from the local school that's overwhelmingly attended by students of color, which winds up with him in front of the Supreme Court.

This was a book I read for my book club, and I was surprised to find I was one of the few for whom it didn't especially resonate. But as I listened to the others talk about how they found the satire refreshing for its bluntness and outrageous honesty about the state of race relations in America, I think maybe one of the reasons it fell a little flatter for me is that I'm on the younger side in that group and being more immersed in an internet culture where these issues are more on the forefront maybe made the punches land less hard, since they were more expected. In a world where Get Out was an enormously popular, Oscar-winning movie (and a good, interesting one that I personally really enjoyed), The Sellout's transgressive satire seems almost tame even though it's only a few years old.

To be sure, there are some brilliantly inspired moments (that opening Supreme Court scene, the Dum-Dum Intellectuals, the "sanitized" versions of racially-problematic novels), and if you're looking for a book that will be very up-front and sometimes uncomfortable (so many n-bombs!) about race in America, this is a very good book. Chattel slavery, and the institutionalized racism that persists to this day, is something that we're still struggling with. This book was written during the Obama era, when everyone was busily congratulating each other on living in a post-racial society, and the way it refuses to play along and pretend that was true feels eerily prescient given the election of Donald Trump. This book is smart, funny, and pulls zero punches (though those punches might not land quite as hard as they did even a few years ago, depending on what the dialogue you engage in looks like). It didn't quite ensnare me, but it's definitely worth reading.

One year ago, I was reading: Uncle Tungsten 

Two years ago, I was reading: A Vast Conspiracy

Three years ago, I was reading: The Paper Magician

Four years ago, I was reading: Oriental Mythology

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Book 207: The Sellout

Book 182: Lincoln In The Bardo

"A train approaches a wall at a fatal rate of speed. You hold a switch in your hand, that accomplishes you know not what: do you throw it? Disaster is otherwise assured.
It costs you nothing. 
Why not try?"

Dates read: October 15-17, 2017

Rating: 8/10

Lists/awards: Booker Prize

As much as it's inextricably woven into our lives, sometimes I wonder what the world would be like right now if there was no social media. No Facebook, no Twitter, no Instagram. Want to share baby photos with friends back home? You'd have to text, or email, or even just hard copy mail them. Advertising would still just be on TV, or in our mailboxes or magazines, or at the top of websites. I'm sure we'd still get those chain forwards from that one aunt, the ones that told you if you didn't forward this on to twelve people by midnight you'd never find love, or that there was a clear image of the devil in the smoke over the Twin Towers on 9/11, or those kind of things. But the ability to share low-quality information widely and quickly would be much diminished.

One area I think it would make a real difference would be in political news coverage. It's easier to cast a gauzy glow over figures that never faced the kind of constant examination that politicians today face. There was a lot of stuff going on in the White Houses of yore that even if it was known, wasn't published and dissected and scrutinized the way things are now. Like, for example, when Abraham Lincoln's 11 year-old son, Willie, died while he was in office during the Civil War. Mary Todd Lincoln had a breakdown, and Lincoln himself didn't cope well either. He went to the vault where his son's body was, at least once, and picked him up and held him. It was a demonstration of terrible, profound grief, and if it happened today can you imagine the tweets?

It is this situation, the heartbroken Lincoln going to see his dead son, that inspired lauded short-story writer George Saunders' first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo. The bardo is based on the Tibetan concept of a liminal state between life and death, fairly similar to the Catholic purgatory but without the connotations of having done something "wrong", and the Lincoln in question is not Abraham but Willie himself. It is his soul that comes to the bardo, where he encounters other spirits, those who have elected to stay. They don't believe themselves quite dead...they refer to their coffins as "sick-boxes" and are sure that they'll soon recover and get back to their lives as they knew them. But they all know that children aren't supposed to linger, they're supposed to move on. And Willie is more or less ready to do so when his father appears, to hold him and talk to him, and promises to come back. So now Willie, too, wants to stay.

There are three main ghosts/spirits/souls that take on the task of trying to figure out how to inspire Willie to move on: Hans, Roger, and Everly. Hans was an older shopkeeper who remarried after the death of his first wife. He waited to consumate his second marriage until his young and lovely bride was comfortable, and after months, she's finally ready to do so...and then Hans is struck violently in the head by a wayward beam. Roger was a young gay man who managed to find love in a time when that was difficult...only to get dumped and slit his wrists in despair. As he bled, he realized how beautiful the world was and how much he wanted to live. And then there's Everly, a former reverend who lived righteously but is too afraid of heavenly judgment to go. They try everything, including communing with the President, to get Willie going where he needs to go.

This is a very odd novel. It's mostly structured like a play...dialogue is followed by a notation of the speaker's name. Then there are occasional sections where Saunders excerpts nonfiction historical sources to describe various aspects of the situation at hand: the party the Lincolns hosted at the White House the night Willie lay dying, what Lincoln actually looked like, what Willie was like, the day of the funeral. There's no traditional "narrative" at all. I'll admit that this made it a bit of a struggle to get into...I don't usually especially enjoy reading plays, and there's not a lot of information provided about what's going on and who the various characters are right off the bat. But my reluctance to put down books before I've finished them paid off here, because once I got into the flow of it, I found the back half quite strong and the ending unexpectedly powerful.

I've never read any of Saunders' short stories, but I'm excited to do so in the future because the sheer inventiveness of this novel is delightful. As someone who loves The Divine Comedy, I enjoyed his take on Dante's technique of contrapasso, giving the spirits physical manifestations matching the reason they won't leave the bardo. Although it won the Booker Prize for its release year (which was awarded the day after I finished reading it!), this is a novel destined to be divisive and one that I'd therefore hesitate recommending widely even though I personally enjoyed it. If you're looking for a straightforward form or narrative, or something more traditionally "historical fiction", this isn't for you. But if you're interested in a more unusual reading experience that challenges you to read in a different way, I'd encourage you to at least give it a try!

One year ago, I was reading: How to Love Wine

Two years ago, I was reading: Migraine

Three years ago, I was reading: Devil in the White City

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Book 182: Lincoln In The Bardo

Book 181: The Blind Assassin

"You want the truth, of course. You want me to put two and two together. But two and two doesn't necessarily get you the truth. Two and two equals a voice outside the window. Two and two equals the wind. The living bird is not its labeled bones."

Dates read: October 10-15, 2017

Rating: 10/10

Lists/awards: The Booker Prize, Time Magazine All-Time 100 Novels

We're constantly telling the story of our lives. To other people, but most of all to ourselves. Amping up the parts that make us look good, glossing over the parts that make us look bad, editing out that parts that don't quite jibe with the character we want ourselves to be. No one likes to remember our worst moments, though those are the ones that creep into our heads at 2 a.m. when we can't sleep. But at the end of the day, all you can do is try to be better tomorrow, and the day after that, and so on and so forth.

Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin starts with the end at the beginning: Iris Chase's sister, Laura, drives off a bridge in Iris's car. From that point on, we get three threads of story: (faux) newspaper accounts related to Iris's life, Iris looking back on her own life as an old woman and telling the story that leads up to what happened with her sister, and a story-within-a-story, called "The Blind Assassin", about a pair of secret lovers weaving a science fiction tale about a pair of secret lovers. Unveiled early on in the narrative through the newspaper accounts, it is revealed that shortly after her sister's death (which is ruled an accident), Iris's husband died. And then their daughter grew up with drug problems and succumbed to them, leaving her own child behind. And then that grandchild was raised not by Iris, but Iris's sister-in-law, who also died. Iris is old, and alone, and has no reason to hold on to her secrets anymore. So she starts to write.

She starts with the story of her grandparents, and the button factory her grandfather started in their small Canadian town, the profits from which rendered him suitable enough marriage material for her grandmother, from a society family in decline. When their three sons went off to war, only Iris's father came back. His wife, Iris and Laura's mother, was never especially healthy and died from complications from a miscarriage. Her father tries to keep the family business together through the Depression, but the Chases find themselves unable to even maintain their own finances, and that's how Iris finds herself married off to Richard, an older industrialist, in a deal that's supposed to keep the factory open and what's left of the family afloat. Instead, the entire Chase family capsizes, in their own ways.

After revisiting The Handmaid's Tale shortly before I read this book, and then reading this book itself, I was reminded what an incredibly gifted author Margaret Atwood is. To pull off the narrative structure of the book, with its intertwining threads and mysteries, is a fiendishly difficult task, but to do it while writing so beautifully and powerfully is the work of a master. It is a little jarring at the beginning, when you're first getting used to the path the book is taking you down, but it works. There were so many passages in this book that I marked, struck by how gorgeous the phrasing was. The characters, particularly Laura and Richard, were vivid, and Iris herself is someone we gradually come to understand as she tells her story and feels so real that when the book and her story end, the loss feels unusually poignant.

This is an incredible book: sad, yes, but told with such skill and in a way that keeps you wanting more and more...I had a hard time putting it down at night. I'm kicking myself that this is only my second Atwood and I'm really looking forward to getting into more of her work. As a heads up to potential readers, there is some really heavy stuff in here: parental death, spousal abuse, sexual abuse/rape...I think Atwood handles this material with sensitivity and grace, but it's something to be aware of. I'd recommend this book strongly, particularly for mature readers (there's nothing gratuitous, but there's a lot of darkness and I think it's a work that's best appreciated with a little life experience behind the reader).

One year ago, I was reading: The Heart of Everything That Is

Two years ago, I was reading: If We Were Villains

Three years ago, I was reading: We Need to Talk About Kevin

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Book 181: The Blind Assassin

Book 168: The Sense Of An Ending

"We live with such easy assumptions, don't we? For instance, that memory equals events plus time. But it's all much odder than this. Who was it that said that memory is what we thought we'd forgotten? And it ought to be obvious to us that time doesn't act as a fixative, rather as a solvent. But it's not convenient—it's not useful—to believe this; it doesn't help us get on with our lives; so we ignore it."

Dates read: August 10-13, 2017

Rating: 8/10

Lists/Awards: Booker Prize, 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, The New York Times bestseller

Like many siblings, my sister and I squabbled a lot growing up. One time, and I can't remember what she said or did that prompted it (if anything), but I was mad at her and I told her that her teeth were yellow. It wasn't even true, they were pretty much the same color as mine. Years later, I asked her why she usually smiled with her mouth closed in pictures, and she told me that she'd been self-conscious about the way her teeth looked ever since I said that to her. I apologized and told her I was just being a jerk, of course, but I've made an effort since she told me that to really think before I snap back at someone I'm upset with. You never know how the words you toss off without thinking can really impact someone's life.

Julian Barnes' The Sense of an Ending illustrates the same principle on a much more profound scale. The book tells the story of Tony Webster, a deeply ordinary person. He went to school, worked a normal office job, got married, had a kid, got divorced, and remained on good terms with his ex into their retirement years. But a mysterious bequest drags him back towards most tumultuous time of his life. As schoolboys, Tony and his friends absorbed into their ranks the new kid in town, Adrian. Adrian was different than them: smarter, more serious. The group starts to fracture after graduation, everyone going their own separate ways to different schools or workplaces. At university, Tony meets and starts dating Veronica.

It is this ultimately short-lived relationship that changes lives. Veronica is mysterious and aloof, and Tony has a hard time knowing where he stands with her. They get serious enough that she takes him home to meet her family, but the only one that's nice to him once he gets there is her mother. They break up shortly after that trip, and not a particularly long time later Adrian writes to Tony to tell him that he's started dating Veronica. Tony is hurt, and writes back angrily. Then he goes on an extended jaunt to America, and it's not until he gets back to England that he hears that Adrian has committed suicide. Tony is, of course, upset, but his life goes on fairly smoothly until that bequest arrives: Veronica's mother has passed and left him a small sum of money and Adrian's diary. The money gets to Tony, but the diary is with Veronica.

Tony's journey to try to understand why he was left anything at all and attempts to get the diary comprise the balance of this slim novel. In its less-than-200 pages, it explores powerful themes: the difference between what we chose to remember and the truth, the impossibility of taking back something that's been said, how we change even though we feel like the same person we've always been. Barnes is a talented writer, and reflects on these with clear, emotionally resonant language that puts into words things that we (or at least I) have thought about but never really been able to distill. The mystery behind it all keeps the plot moving forward, but it never feels tantalizing just to inspire page-turning. Rather, the interesting thing is how Tony reacts to each new twist.

Barnes does brilliant characterization work with Tony, by the time things are wrapping up he feels like an old friend who has a way of dropping wistful bon mots about life. Both Adrian himself and Margaret (Tony's ex-wife) likewise feel realized despite appearing relatively infrequently in the narrative. But Veronica, who winds up being a significant factor, never really came together for me. The "clues" she gives Tony are maddening...if she really doesn't want to engage with him, she could have avoided him entirely, but for her to make just enough contact with him to drop cryptic references doesn't make sense. Either tell him what's going on, because he clearly doesn't get it, or ignore him. Her remoteness and Tony's inability to comprehend her are one thing, but I can't understand her own motives at all, which took away from my enjoyment of the book. As for the final resolution itself, I'm not sure I go all the way there with it. That being said, this is a lovely and powerful book, and I'd recommend it very highly.

Tell me, blog friends...have you ever said something to someone that you wish you could take back?

One year ago, I was reading: Wonder Boys

Two years ago, I was reading: Zealot

Three years ago, I was reading: Ahab's Wife

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Book 168: The Sense Of An Ending

Book 75: The White Tiger

 "If I were making a country, I’d get the sewage pipes first, then the democracy, then I’d go about giving pamphlets and statues of Gandhi to other people, but what do I know? I’m just a murderer!"

Read: August 1-3, 2016

Rating: 8/10

Lists/Awards: 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die (2012), Man Booker Prize

Here's a weird thing: I am actively pro-spoiler. Which you've probably noticed reading this blog...I try not to be gratuitous, but I will spoil things if it's necessary to talk about what I want to talk about regarding a book. I maintain that if your work (and I'm including movies and TV here) doesn't hang together if you know the Big Plot Twist, it's because it's not very good in the first place: the characterization, the quality of the writing, the dialogue, the pacing...if those aren't there, you don't have a well-told story, you just have a plot twist. Discovering the why is always more compelling for me than discovering the what.

Which is why I have a soft spot for books, like Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger, that tell you their big plot twist right up front. We know at the end of the first chapter that our narrator Balram, a former servant turned entrepreneur in India, killed his former master. What unfolds over the rest of the book is the story of why. It's the story of India in the modern day, a place of desperate poverty but also extravagant wealth, where ancient temples are just as much a part of life as smartphones. Balram is born into poverty in a rural area, and even though he seems destined to become a laborer, he resists the forces (including his family) that try to keep him in the underclass as long as he can. He finds himself a position as a driver for an upper-class landowner, and eventually moves with one of the landowner's sons to New Delhi to be his driver there.

New Delhi fundamentally changes both that son, Ashok, and Balram. Ashok has been educated in America, and treats his servants more or less like people. As he gets more and more sucked into the mire of his family's business (they're in the coal industry, and Ashok does a lot of running around with briefcases full of money to drop off with various politicians and officials), he becomes harder and harsher. When Balram is nearly forced to take the fall for a bad accident caused by Ashok's wife's drunk driving, Balram realizes that even as far as he's come from his roots, he's still not really safe. As long as he's poor and a servant, he'll always be expendable. But in order to get out of his situation, he needs money, and the money he has the easiest access to? Those briefcases that he's driving Ashok around with.

It's a dark satire, and after reading a lot of Serious Literature, I appreciated its wit and liveliness even more than I otherwise might have. But I would have enjoyed it no matter what. It's an epistolary novel (Balram writes to the prime minister of China, who is visiting India at the time, to explain India's entrepreneurial spirit), which allows it to skip around in time a little for maximum impact...we know that he's committed murder and gone on to start his own business, but how (and why) did he do it? How did he get away with it? What exactly does he do now?  The organic tension propels the book forward without being too mysterious. Balram is an indelible character, and I really appreciated the way that Adiga developed Ashok as well, portraying his moral decay even though we only see him through Balram's eyes. It's a quick read that manages to be thought-provoking while still being entertaining.

 Tell me, blog friends...how do you feel about spoilers?

One year ago, I was reading: Enchanted Islands

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Book 75: The White Tiger