These posts are for anyone that’s interested, my stab at figuring out the impact of this recent year, as a narrative and a cluster of narratives. My analysis will cover large scale political processes and culture, in analysis of the manner in which I experienced them and why I think they are particularly central. Along the way I’ll take advantage of this form to rant on the worst books I read as a form of retribution for experiencing them. Hopefully these lists and the analysis may be of some interest to you, any commentary you have on them or your own assessment are welcomed.
Ten Best Novels Read in 2011
Best novels read by me, that is. At this point I’m being wantonly narcissistic, this isn’t based on the best books written or published in the previous calender period, instead it’s book from some arbitrary point in the past that I happened to read for the first time in the past year. Partly I’m doing it this way because recent publication dates are themselves very arbitrary and differently distributed, partly because my own reading there has been rather partial-- extensive in speculative fiction, meager elsewhere, and even in science fiction and fantasy I haven’t read half the books of the last year I want to, and don’t yet want to be making claims about the best book published in the year. Using the personal timeline has the advantage of at least moving beyond one genre with any depth. There’s unlikely to be a direct parallel to others’ experiences as a set of literature, and in most cases these are works that are already relatively famous, and don’t require discovery or whatever additional minor attention I can bring to them. Nevertheless I offer this as a personal assessment, on the novels that most impressed and changed me as I encountered them from the past year.
1. Dhalgren by Samuel Delany (1974)
2. Absolute Friends by John Le Carre (2003)
3. Red Plenty by Francis Spufford (2010)
4. Oh Pure and Radiant Heart by Lydia Millet (2005)
5. A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan (2010)
6. Stoner by John Williams (1965)
7. Embassytown by China Mieville (2011)
8. The Affirmation by Christopher Priest (1981)
9. Soul Mountain by Gao Xingjian (1990)
10. Old School by Tobias Wolff (2003)
1. Dhalgren by Samuel Delany
A sprawling, vivid and utterly successful investigation into bodily politics. Which means race, gender and sexuality, in particularly vivid rhetorical form. The book is filled with what would be generally regarded as profanity, here taken not as a shock but to create a specific microcosm of regional sex and violence as a norm. Above all the book is unapologetic, not fearing to dismantle every buffer that keeps subjects taboo for conservative and liberal subjects, instead getting at the core of the daily interactions that make contemporary U.S. society such a racist and rape-driven regime, among other things. Delany offers a level of implicit narrative commentary on the present world that’s startling, and he does it in full commitment to an imaginative piece of science fiction. Linked to all this is a story of corporeal politics, a recognition of the relationships imposed by certain types of violence and the politics that drive this even as it also explores utopian politics. The body emerges not as natural constant but precisely that which is least fixed, the most radically fluid.
A long book, and unpleasant in a lot of its subject details, but it fully earns it’s length and unpleasantness. It’s science fiction for social critique and reality dysfunction in high flying Philip K. Dick style, except even Dick was never quite this good.
2. Absolute Friends by John Le Carre
Le Carre moves beyond the Cold War spy thriller with gusto, fearlessly tackling the intrinsic abuse of the counter-terrorist state in a dramatized but not over the top fashion. The control over plotting and characterization is as good as he’s ever had, showing the careful manipulation of when the characters and reader have access to certain information, as well as portraying the complexity of lives that exist under the bleak absurdity of the twenty first century. It’s a book that at points flirts with meltdown, of theme as well as narrative, but builds masterfully to a strong climax that pushes the impact of just how mass-information can be contrived, and what the human consequences are. Le Carre writes a forceful, angry reaction to Bush Two a lot earlier than most authors had the courage to, and even more impressive is how he does this without sacrificing any narrative coherence or power of prose.
3. Red Plenty by Francis Spufford
An in-depth piece of history through way of a novel or, as some have argued, science fiction applied to speculative economics rather than physical divergence. Either way it concerns a large cast struggling to get by in Khruschev’s Russia, with a long-burning attempt to achieve the utopian potential still pulsing in the bowels of the Soviet system. The book is unstinting about the abuses of the Bolshevik experiment, from high government to police repression to the contractions of daily life. Yet the work also captures better than almost anything I’ve seen the appeal of the far-left alternative, and the way that individuals continued on with their own dignity and sense of priorities. It’s the rare truly great narrative of history, well researched and capturing also the feel of history as it plays out, the transition among differnt Soviet policies managing to feel as monumental as any other traumatic counter-revolution. It’s a great novel both because of the genres that it dislocates and because any one of them--the period drama, the historical epic, the political assessment, the historical component--are done surpassingly well.
4. Oh Pure and Radiant Heart by Lydia Millet
It’s mainstream fiction using a speculative fiction premise, in this case the conceit that Oppenheimer, Fermi and Szilard are transported from the Trinity Explosion to the present day. Often when writers outside the genre tackle a science fiction concept it’s awkward, ending up reinventing the wheel or using a problematic assumption of what does or doesn’t need to be explained. Here the flimsiness of the main time travel conceit damages the story not at all, allowing a forceful and well balanced story of how nuclear capability developed before and after Trinity, and the existential degrading of humans that has accompanied it. The story seems to invite either comedic farce and there are points of comedy, but the energy of the piece is in a frightening, pathos-filled and vivid condemnation of where things are at now, particularly relating to increasing fundamentalism and militarization of politics. It also manages some of the best characterization I’ve seen, in the historical recreations as well as the contemporary anchor, which also show an outstanding instances of well-defined scientists and female characters that are unapologetic about being such.
5. A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
2010’s outstanding literary work, a hyperlink story that describes a diverse set of characters portrayed with consistent skill and nuance. It grabs interest from the first lines and never relinquishes this, managing frequent shifts in perspective and style that disorient and reward repeatedly. It works as a supremely entertaining story as well as a meaningful one, showing both the surreal connections of the modern world and the march towards death that faces all the characters across social ranks.
6. Stoner by John Williams
The earliest book on this list, Williams’ brilliant deconstruction of academic indepence. The novels first pages describe evaluates its subject, William Stoner, as failing to make a positive impact or to be remembered much in his life, and the book ruthlessly lives up to that premise. The icy and unlovable protagonist has considerable integrity, and ability to accept without complaint hardship in his life. These same qualities lead to accepting of powerlessness and treating disaster for himself and those closest to him as the sad necessity rather than anything alterable. At the same time Williams builds Stoner up as a credible and interesting figure, making his doomed and overly quiet life more suspenseful than most war stories I’ve read. And in the process the novel evokes the attraction of academia while also condemning its rivalry, male-privilege, sterility and basic lack of empathy. Yet the vivid collective norms are ultimately secondary to the individual focus and Stoner is at base an epigraph delivered on its protagonist from first page to last, a severe judgement but a well defined one. There are weaknesses to the novel, particularly its positioning of Stoner’s wife as a shrewish villain, but the power of Willaims’ prose, story and stark tone builds to an extremely satisfying whole.
7. Embassytown by China Mieville
The only book on this list that was actually published in 2011, and one that comes off an author I’ve found almost constantly excellent. Embassytown isn’t quite as effective as some of his best work, but in contrast to his recent lackluster Kraken and the speculative fiction world more generally it’s sheer gold. Embassytown succeeds partly on strength of concept, weaving together an invented language, tumultuous political intrigue and a progressively more and more strife torn alien city. The book works on many levels, as a creation of an intricate imagined urban space, in bending concepts of the possibility of language structure, and in relating this to a forceful anti-imperialist subtext. It even at points works as a zombie eschatology par excellence. Most of all it succeeds in balancing the different genres and climates, existing within Mieville’s best-plotted story and an ambitious departure from his usual norms. Finally the book plays to the best traditions of science fiction in emphasizing the vast scale of the wider setting, the way that the size of the polities and even more the physical environment put the intense micro-events in a wider context.
8. The Affirmation by Christopher Priest
Priest is consistently interested in themes of duality, questionable identity and the impact of written texts. The Affirmation is his most effective exploration of these themes to date, that introduces a deep ambiguity into its presentation of reality early on, and builds tension over this question up through the last page. It’s recognizably speculative fiction but not of any of the usual variants, framing compelling and largely credible worldbuilding that is never larger than its protagonist. That setup could be irritatingly claustrophobic but it develops into an interesting exploration of memory, immortality, amnesia and hedonism.
9. Soul Mountain by Gao Xingjian
I read this as part of a Nobel Laureate listing, with this novel as one of the relatively few high-returns of the past year. It’s effective primarily in showing character detail through cultural resistance and vitality, an array of strange quasi-episodic details unified by a common desire for reinvention. It works extremely well even as an alien culture, and I can only imagine how effective it would be experienced by someone more familiar with the context China. Like a lot of my favorites from recent reading it’s a novel of identity, focusing on the ambiguous and exciting reaches of self. Unusually for my reading this was basically a plot driven by travel, with journeying and the situations encountered are enough to compel interest across the story.
10. Old School by Tobias Wolff
Among other things the book has a crushing, spot on assessment of what meeting living literary fame would actually feel like, varying slightly on individual (including a deconstruction of Ayn Rand’s basic viciousness) as well as the principal of a celebrated life in itself (as in a tale of Hemingway’s actual presence deflating a lifetime of an instructor allowing everyone to assume a close personal friendship to the man). More centrally Wolff brilliantly uncovers the meaning of texts in themselves, the thrill of encountering a book, the process of different literary tastes, the easily-compromised mechanisms of authorship and the tangle of scholastic identity. I know nothing of Wolff beyond this story but it feels autobiographical, moreover its power lies in producing a similar resonance in the reader. It’s an extremely quiet tale, but also one of the most effective in its statements and silences.
This is second book on my list for this year that was published in 2003, set in the early 80s and with a deeply interior focus it seems a different world than Le Carre’s confrontational information thriller. In an odd way they do make appropriate thematic parallels, with Wolff’s focus on the creation of fictions and the insecurity of masculine identities a reasonable link to the year of Operation Iraqi Freedom.
Showing posts with label nobel. Show all posts
Showing posts with label nobel. Show all posts
Saturday, December 31, 2011
Thursday, July 1, 2010
The Homecoming
Harold Pinter
Nobel laureate, a short play. Quite displeasing, featuring a long sequence of arbitrary and unpleasant action, revolving around characters that are even more simplistic and unappealing. The dialog fails to be very believable, and fails even more at being rhetorically appealing. I’m left baffled by Pinter’s fame and critical success, and am thoroughly uninterested in reading his other material.
Worse than: The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart by Jesse Bullington
Better than: Hylozoic by Rudy Rucker
Nobel laureate, a short play. Quite displeasing, featuring a long sequence of arbitrary and unpleasant action, revolving around characters that are even more simplistic and unappealing. The dialog fails to be very believable, and fails even more at being rhetorically appealing. I’m left baffled by Pinter’s fame and critical success, and am thoroughly uninterested in reading his other material.
Worse than: The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart by Jesse Bullington
Better than: Hylozoic by Rudy Rucker
Tuesday, June 29, 2010
The Tin Drum
Gunter Grass
Nobel Laureate. I found this novel powerful and affecting, but not everything I had hoped for. In part I may be guilty of coming in with overly high expectations. Gunter Grass is someone I’ve heard a lot about, and heard a lot of endorsements concerning, for quite some time, on the level of personal reactions and academia. In the later I have seen a number of descriptions of Grass as one of the key German post-war writers, and as someone who brought a lot of necessary challengs to the general cultural climate with its specific national burdens and issues. After that, I found the novel strong and intriguing, but not great, and not something that establishes Grass as that unique an author. It abounds in intricate characterization, gifted situational description and basic mechanics of good writing. It lacks a certan measure of je ne sai quoi, though, a magnitude of literary quality or special insight into the character of human existene, a larger force to the plot, something.
The story focuses on the recollections of a rather quirky individual--quirky to the extent that he’s writing his backstory from a mental asylum. It shows the progress of his life through two world wars and socio-political unrest, with the consistent metaphor of music used for both underlying patterns and madness. It has a lot of funny and very striking scenes, and one thing the novel does do very well is tying such a weird and comical figure into very substantive reflections on the process of history. It’s a juxtaposition that makes the book at once utterly absurd and very serious, building a measure of seriousness in with comedy in a way that most authors couldn’t manage but that Grass pulls off as if it’s second nature. The insights provided in here are in no small amount about Nazism and the relation of the general populace to it. Two particular moments come to mind. The first is where the narrator reflects explicitly on the fact that he wasn’t in the resistance in the Nazi period, and that his petty acts of juvenile disruption shouldn’t legitimately be considered a political strike against the Third Reich. In this approach he offers a strong indictment of the conventional rationalizations prevalent in postwar Germany (see some of the history texts from a bit ago) and offers a strong contribution to arguing for a shift in general responsability and cultural self-awareness. The second moment is a description of the entry of Germany into savagery through "the gas man", in a few pages of powerful horror that represent the most effectively written part of the book.
Other themes that emerge forcefully include normality, sex, class and physicality, all delivered in some quirky and illuminating scenes. The family situation as elaborated was some of the most interesting material, but by the end I wasn’t entirely sure what to make of it, what the author was driving at and how it connects to the central biazarre formula at the heart of the novel.
On the whole it’s funny, it’s meaningful, and I can see that it deserves to be widely read. I don’t quite see it as great literature though, and reserve judgement as to whether Grass is good enough to merit a Nobel prize. There’s nothing particularly wrong with The Tin Drum, but I do feel the potential for it to have gone further on character and story.
Worse than: The Revolt of the Angels by Anatole France
Better than: Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
Nobel Laureate. I found this novel powerful and affecting, but not everything I had hoped for. In part I may be guilty of coming in with overly high expectations. Gunter Grass is someone I’ve heard a lot about, and heard a lot of endorsements concerning, for quite some time, on the level of personal reactions and academia. In the later I have seen a number of descriptions of Grass as one of the key German post-war writers, and as someone who brought a lot of necessary challengs to the general cultural climate with its specific national burdens and issues. After that, I found the novel strong and intriguing, but not great, and not something that establishes Grass as that unique an author. It abounds in intricate characterization, gifted situational description and basic mechanics of good writing. It lacks a certan measure of je ne sai quoi, though, a magnitude of literary quality or special insight into the character of human existene, a larger force to the plot, something.
The story focuses on the recollections of a rather quirky individual--quirky to the extent that he’s writing his backstory from a mental asylum. It shows the progress of his life through two world wars and socio-political unrest, with the consistent metaphor of music used for both underlying patterns and madness. It has a lot of funny and very striking scenes, and one thing the novel does do very well is tying such a weird and comical figure into very substantive reflections on the process of history. It’s a juxtaposition that makes the book at once utterly absurd and very serious, building a measure of seriousness in with comedy in a way that most authors couldn’t manage but that Grass pulls off as if it’s second nature. The insights provided in here are in no small amount about Nazism and the relation of the general populace to it. Two particular moments come to mind. The first is where the narrator reflects explicitly on the fact that he wasn’t in the resistance in the Nazi period, and that his petty acts of juvenile disruption shouldn’t legitimately be considered a political strike against the Third Reich. In this approach he offers a strong indictment of the conventional rationalizations prevalent in postwar Germany (see some of the history texts from a bit ago) and offers a strong contribution to arguing for a shift in general responsability and cultural self-awareness. The second moment is a description of the entry of Germany into savagery through "the gas man", in a few pages of powerful horror that represent the most effectively written part of the book.
Other themes that emerge forcefully include normality, sex, class and physicality, all delivered in some quirky and illuminating scenes. The family situation as elaborated was some of the most interesting material, but by the end I wasn’t entirely sure what to make of it, what the author was driving at and how it connects to the central biazarre formula at the heart of the novel.
On the whole it’s funny, it’s meaningful, and I can see that it deserves to be widely read. I don’t quite see it as great literature though, and reserve judgement as to whether Grass is good enough to merit a Nobel prize. There’s nothing particularly wrong with The Tin Drum, but I do feel the potential for it to have gone further on character and story.
Worse than: The Revolt of the Angels by Anatole France
Better than: Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
Independent People
Haldor Laxness
Nobel Laureate. This time it’s an Icelandic farming epic. The switch in locales isn’t a great improvement, and the movement in authors is only a slight improvement. There is a fair bit more drama and basic quality of interst in the narrative. It also benefits from a more complex provision for the main characters. I even won’t deny the high quality of writing for the story and some considerable subtlety in showing the movement of modernity and politics onto an agricultural community. Nevertheless it shares the same basic aesthetic problem of Growth of the Soil; in binding the plot to the development of agriculture it makes for a pace much to slow to drive consistent interest. Under the stress of little happening beyond interaction with the characters, these individuals are forced under a level of depiction that doesn’t benefit them. It’s not that they’re overly simple, rather they are unpleasant, being too dysfunctional and strongly petty to have much interest in rooting for them. That makes the continued long term presence of them with little that they do to take the novel outside of them rather exhausting.
I’m ambivalent as to the effectiveness of the main and titular theme of the novel. A lot of the book is about putting forth notions of freedom, and the protagonist’s desire to live as a free man against all obstacles. To a large extent this ambition is contextualized and deconstructing, making some rather satisfying representations of it as petty and largely incapable, showing wider social complexities and government moving in beyond any sort of juvenile Heinlein-esque focus on the rugged autonomous individual. In the moments of showing contradiction, and the way this independence can be born on the subordination of others, the novel achieves some strong insights and real interest. Yet it seems at the end to come down on some level to admiration of this desire for total independence taken as a behavioral approach and ideal. I may be misreading it, and to an extent my frustrations with the aesthetic experience may have blunted my grasp of the subtlety of the ultimate message. Still, as I see it presently the story appears to side uncritically with the rather disjointed individualist view in a way that undermines itself. Not least due to how unplesant the protagonist is.
Better than: Growth of the Soil by Knut Hamsun
Worse than: The Forgotten by Elie Wiesel
Nobel Laureate. This time it’s an Icelandic farming epic. The switch in locales isn’t a great improvement, and the movement in authors is only a slight improvement. There is a fair bit more drama and basic quality of interst in the narrative. It also benefits from a more complex provision for the main characters. I even won’t deny the high quality of writing for the story and some considerable subtlety in showing the movement of modernity and politics onto an agricultural community. Nevertheless it shares the same basic aesthetic problem of Growth of the Soil; in binding the plot to the development of agriculture it makes for a pace much to slow to drive consistent interest. Under the stress of little happening beyond interaction with the characters, these individuals are forced under a level of depiction that doesn’t benefit them. It’s not that they’re overly simple, rather they are unpleasant, being too dysfunctional and strongly petty to have much interest in rooting for them. That makes the continued long term presence of them with little that they do to take the novel outside of them rather exhausting.
I’m ambivalent as to the effectiveness of the main and titular theme of the novel. A lot of the book is about putting forth notions of freedom, and the protagonist’s desire to live as a free man against all obstacles. To a large extent this ambition is contextualized and deconstructing, making some rather satisfying representations of it as petty and largely incapable, showing wider social complexities and government moving in beyond any sort of juvenile Heinlein-esque focus on the rugged autonomous individual. In the moments of showing contradiction, and the way this independence can be born on the subordination of others, the novel achieves some strong insights and real interest. Yet it seems at the end to come down on some level to admiration of this desire for total independence taken as a behavioral approach and ideal. I may be misreading it, and to an extent my frustrations with the aesthetic experience may have blunted my grasp of the subtlety of the ultimate message. Still, as I see it presently the story appears to side uncritically with the rather disjointed individualist view in a way that undermines itself. Not least due to how unplesant the protagonist is.
Better than: Growth of the Soil by Knut Hamsun
Worse than: The Forgotten by Elie Wiesel
The Revolt of the Angels
Antaole France
Nobel Laureate. Excellent, starts a bit slow but proves itself to be a tour de force of comic invention, emotional intensity and general creativity. The story appears for the first forty pages to be a setup for a rather dull society world with one Maurice the owner of a vast collection of books and discovering one of them to have gone missing. After a bit of by the numbers effort to see who might have taken it, Maurice is met by the being responsible. It’s his guardian angel, and as the result of reading the rationalist literary text the angel has decided that religion and the bonds of heaven are tyranny, and sets about to spread emancipatory consciousness among the order of angels. The title of the book wasn’t symbolic, it features the direct plot of the book, with lots of unexpected turns, good insights and general hilarity. The strength of the discordant relationship between Maurice and his ex-guardian angel could carry the book in themselves--there’s lots of hilarious and surreal scenes like where Maurice tries (unsuccessfully) to preach the virtues of religion, or when he challenges the angel into a duel over an issue of personal honor. Ultimately the book’s scale is a lot wider than just that aspect, and it benefits from it.
Much of the book is a direct satire. It’s from the early twentieth century and bits of this humor haven’t aged well, but a lot of it has. For instance there’s the effort by one angel to talk another into rebellion against the celestrial arrangement and the current social arrangement in France. The second angel protests, on the grounds that France needs no change and was already completely perfect. It then goes on a speech on how the main credit bank of Frane was particularly refined "as pure and chaste and the Holy Virgin."
The novel also has, late on, one of the most affecting inversions of Christian myth that I’ve seen. The text had previously established a gnostic worldview where the entity ruling by the name of God was a lying oppressor of less than ultimate power. It had also shown Satan and his followers to be free thinkers, who tried to defeat God from humanitarian altruist notions. Across the novel the new outbreak lead by Maurice’s ex-guardian angel linked up with the old resistance and formede plans for a new front, gathering strength to a march against the status quo. In the last chapter Satan has a dream, whereby his invasion is successful, the God-being is cast down and he takes on the celestial throne. The scenario plays out longer, with Satan becoming more cold, distant and egotistical, remote from and callous towards the human suffering that motivated his earlier fighting. He starts to shroud himself in mystery and hierarchy and govern as a tyrant. Simultaneously, cast down from the seat of power and command, God begins to observe the suffering of the small people and has a turn towards compassion and activity. Satan awakes from the dream, sees that a successful invasion of Heaen would just switch roles, and calls off the attack, resolving to maintain his spirit of compassion and work to help in smaller ways. There’s a basic attitude of decency built into this story that’s rather affecting, combined with the very strong and narratively surprising ending tone of anti-militarism. Such moments, of which the above is only the culmination, establish a writer of great sensitivity and complexity as well as humor.
The novel is enormously rewarding and entertaining. Proof that at least sometimes the Nobel Award for Literature wen into deserving hands. I’m definitely going to look up more of Anatole France’s writings.
Similar to and better than: Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett
Similar to and also better than: The Hunchback of Notre Dama by Victor Hugo
Nobel Laureate. Excellent, starts a bit slow but proves itself to be a tour de force of comic invention, emotional intensity and general creativity. The story appears for the first forty pages to be a setup for a rather dull society world with one Maurice the owner of a vast collection of books and discovering one of them to have gone missing. After a bit of by the numbers effort to see who might have taken it, Maurice is met by the being responsible. It’s his guardian angel, and as the result of reading the rationalist literary text the angel has decided that religion and the bonds of heaven are tyranny, and sets about to spread emancipatory consciousness among the order of angels. The title of the book wasn’t symbolic, it features the direct plot of the book, with lots of unexpected turns, good insights and general hilarity. The strength of the discordant relationship between Maurice and his ex-guardian angel could carry the book in themselves--there’s lots of hilarious and surreal scenes like where Maurice tries (unsuccessfully) to preach the virtues of religion, or when he challenges the angel into a duel over an issue of personal honor. Ultimately the book’s scale is a lot wider than just that aspect, and it benefits from it.
Much of the book is a direct satire. It’s from the early twentieth century and bits of this humor haven’t aged well, but a lot of it has. For instance there’s the effort by one angel to talk another into rebellion against the celestrial arrangement and the current social arrangement in France. The second angel protests, on the grounds that France needs no change and was already completely perfect. It then goes on a speech on how the main credit bank of Frane was particularly refined "as pure and chaste and the Holy Virgin."
The novel also has, late on, one of the most affecting inversions of Christian myth that I’ve seen. The text had previously established a gnostic worldview where the entity ruling by the name of God was a lying oppressor of less than ultimate power. It had also shown Satan and his followers to be free thinkers, who tried to defeat God from humanitarian altruist notions. Across the novel the new outbreak lead by Maurice’s ex-guardian angel linked up with the old resistance and formede plans for a new front, gathering strength to a march against the status quo. In the last chapter Satan has a dream, whereby his invasion is successful, the God-being is cast down and he takes on the celestial throne. The scenario plays out longer, with Satan becoming more cold, distant and egotistical, remote from and callous towards the human suffering that motivated his earlier fighting. He starts to shroud himself in mystery and hierarchy and govern as a tyrant. Simultaneously, cast down from the seat of power and command, God begins to observe the suffering of the small people and has a turn towards compassion and activity. Satan awakes from the dream, sees that a successful invasion of Heaen would just switch roles, and calls off the attack, resolving to maintain his spirit of compassion and work to help in smaller ways. There’s a basic attitude of decency built into this story that’s rather affecting, combined with the very strong and narratively surprising ending tone of anti-militarism. Such moments, of which the above is only the culmination, establish a writer of great sensitivity and complexity as well as humor.
The novel is enormously rewarding and entertaining. Proof that at least sometimes the Nobel Award for Literature wen into deserving hands. I’m definitely going to look up more of Anatole France’s writings.
Similar to and better than: Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett
Similar to and also better than: The Hunchback of Notre Dama by Victor Hugo
So Forth: Poems
by Joseph Brodsky
Nobel laureate. Now, this one is more like it. The poems here have a crispness, intensity and basic clarity sadly lacking in Eliiot, and it gives them a great range in bringing to life specific situations. In the format most of the poems are attached to a definite situation or story, making them more like very short fiction that happens to be beautifully and strangely expressed, rather than a whole reflection of literature on literature that I found ultimately alienating about the Wasteland.
And that’s it. Not surprisingly I find it even more difficult to comment substantively about poetry that I like than to criticize it. I do think that Brodsky merits the Nobel Award he received,, and I could be interesting in seeing his other writing at some point. It also makes me interested in what other great literary poets are like, and the type of range that might be developed in mining this field more.
Better than: The Wasteland and Other Poems by T. S. Eliot
Worse than: Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
Nobel laureate. Now, this one is more like it. The poems here have a crispness, intensity and basic clarity sadly lacking in Eliiot, and it gives them a great range in bringing to life specific situations. In the format most of the poems are attached to a definite situation or story, making them more like very short fiction that happens to be beautifully and strangely expressed, rather than a whole reflection of literature on literature that I found ultimately alienating about the Wasteland.
And that’s it. Not surprisingly I find it even more difficult to comment substantively about poetry that I like than to criticize it. I do think that Brodsky merits the Nobel Award he received,, and I could be interesting in seeing his other writing at some point. It also makes me interested in what other great literary poets are like, and the type of range that might be developed in mining this field more.
Better than: The Wasteland and Other Poems by T. S. Eliot
Worse than: Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
The Wasteland and Other Poems
by T. S. Eliot
Nobel Laureate. Very difficult to approach with a clear setup or even as a fair reader. One, I don’t generally read poetry, and I enjoy it even less. Two, Eliot’s work is really too famous to engage with, and has been alluded to or quoted in part so often that it’s difficult to factor through the connections to the actual writing. I was always going to be a hard sell on this particular text. And, unsurprisingly, I can’t count myself highly moved, enlightened or entertained. There are good elements in here, with the obvious control over language on display, and some striking imagery. On the whole, however, I found it dull, awkward, overly dense to follow and not delivering appreciable insights when parsed. In part this issue comes round to Eliot’s distasteful politics and simplistic religious endorsement that I find displeasing, and which it’s hard to disentangle my view. In either case, though, ther seems to be a fundamental limitation in the vision of what to say with the poems and how to say it, a type of writing that at points seems to purposely distance itself from ready access.
Above all what struck me was how upper bound it was, how insistent Eliot’s poems were in citing earlier classics as the ground for becoming classics themselves. It’s overwhelmingly elitist, increadibly focused on an education available to few and which was accessed by even fewer in Eliot’s time. That makes for a fitting, is aesthetically deflating, pattern in the fame and widespread literary allusion to which the poems, and especially the Wasteland, have been subject. Reading it felt often like a closed book, it was so heavily bound up in referring to previous literary classics, and had been so often alluded to in a similar fashion, that all the nicely craften literary quality seemed self-contained. It’s a well formed exercise, and one can easily see how it gives generations of scholars work in parsing and interpreting. Beyond that, though, it seems to be self-contained and purposefully detached from possible application for the world in a manner that I do not see with most literature.
Worse than: Purgatorio by Dante Alighieri
Better than: Effi Briest by Theodor Fontane
Nobel Laureate. Very difficult to approach with a clear setup or even as a fair reader. One, I don’t generally read poetry, and I enjoy it even less. Two, Eliot’s work is really too famous to engage with, and has been alluded to or quoted in part so often that it’s difficult to factor through the connections to the actual writing. I was always going to be a hard sell on this particular text. And, unsurprisingly, I can’t count myself highly moved, enlightened or entertained. There are good elements in here, with the obvious control over language on display, and some striking imagery. On the whole, however, I found it dull, awkward, overly dense to follow and not delivering appreciable insights when parsed. In part this issue comes round to Eliot’s distasteful politics and simplistic religious endorsement that I find displeasing, and which it’s hard to disentangle my view. In either case, though, ther seems to be a fundamental limitation in the vision of what to say with the poems and how to say it, a type of writing that at points seems to purposely distance itself from ready access.
Above all what struck me was how upper bound it was, how insistent Eliot’s poems were in citing earlier classics as the ground for becoming classics themselves. It’s overwhelmingly elitist, increadibly focused on an education available to few and which was accessed by even fewer in Eliot’s time. That makes for a fitting, is aesthetically deflating, pattern in the fame and widespread literary allusion to which the poems, and especially the Wasteland, have been subject. Reading it felt often like a closed book, it was so heavily bound up in referring to previous literary classics, and had been so often alluded to in a similar fashion, that all the nicely craften literary quality seemed self-contained. It’s a well formed exercise, and one can easily see how it gives generations of scholars work in parsing and interpreting. Beyond that, though, it seems to be self-contained and purposefully detached from possible application for the world in a manner that I do not see with most literature.
Worse than: Purgatorio by Dante Alighieri
Better than: Effi Briest by Theodor Fontane
Magic Seeds
V. S. Naipaul
Nobel laureate. A rather odd book, less a real story than a drawn out circumstance of dialog, general country descriptions and opportunities to render the intricate backstory of its main character. It works pretty well, though, because all of these elements are well done, and the book sustains an energy that made this a fast read. In terms of big insights the work is a bit modest on that score, but the juxtaposition of different parts of the past and reflection on the process of memory has its thematic weight, and the description of the foreign (to me) society has its intricate and affecting aspects.
Worse than: The New Life by Orhan Damuk
Better than: Growth of the Soil by Knut Hamsun
Nobel laureate. A rather odd book, less a real story than a drawn out circumstance of dialog, general country descriptions and opportunities to render the intricate backstory of its main character. It works pretty well, though, because all of these elements are well done, and the book sustains an energy that made this a fast read. In terms of big insights the work is a bit modest on that score, but the juxtaposition of different parts of the past and reflection on the process of memory has its thematic weight, and the description of the foreign (to me) society has its intricate and affecting aspects.
Worse than: The New Life by Orhan Damuk
Better than: Growth of the Soil by Knut Hamsun
Greed
Eldriede Jelinek
Book by a Nobel Laureate, disturbing and powerful. Very dark subject matter, and it’s not the type of book that’s compelling and effective in spite of this. Rather it’s a great novel precisely because it jumps straight on into some very dark subjects, moving unflinching into the disturbed patterns of misogny, didsgust, masochism and sadism that drive character snetiments in the story. The environment is contemporary rural Austria, although much of the story isn’t bound to that particular locale, and what renders it distinct is less the foreigness of the environment than the particular authorial view proivded, the deep and unsympathetic focus given to drawn out character encounters. It’s a book where the relation of people to each other drives the pace, or rather how people relate to others as objects, seeking exploitation, benefit, making use of, with an enormous distance from any real sentiment or emotional connection. That disconnect emerges particularly forcefully in the presentation of sex, of which there is a great deal in the novel, much of it disturbing and morally troubling, the rest merely disquieting. In any case, however, it’s undeniably intense, and provides a very strong sense of how materiality can function, how the limits of bodies becomes the defining aspect of all one’s perspective on the world, and how this view distorts the main psychology. That all this fetishization and pain/pleasure melding is rendered because of modern consumer-driven capitalism is made quite clear without having to be made at all preachy. Greed was a consistently disturbing novel, but that was completely intentional, and it shakes up expectations in a way I feel works, politically and aesthetically. Also distinguished by great quality of writing and a simply extraordinary command over voice. One of the best Nobel laureates I’ve yet read.
Worse than: The Sleepwalkers by Hermann Broch
Better than: The New Life by Orhan Damuk
Book by a Nobel Laureate, disturbing and powerful. Very dark subject matter, and it’s not the type of book that’s compelling and effective in spite of this. Rather it’s a great novel precisely because it jumps straight on into some very dark subjects, moving unflinching into the disturbed patterns of misogny, didsgust, masochism and sadism that drive character snetiments in the story. The environment is contemporary rural Austria, although much of the story isn’t bound to that particular locale, and what renders it distinct is less the foreigness of the environment than the particular authorial view proivded, the deep and unsympathetic focus given to drawn out character encounters. It’s a book where the relation of people to each other drives the pace, or rather how people relate to others as objects, seeking exploitation, benefit, making use of, with an enormous distance from any real sentiment or emotional connection. That disconnect emerges particularly forcefully in the presentation of sex, of which there is a great deal in the novel, much of it disturbing and morally troubling, the rest merely disquieting. In any case, however, it’s undeniably intense, and provides a very strong sense of how materiality can function, how the limits of bodies becomes the defining aspect of all one’s perspective on the world, and how this view distorts the main psychology. That all this fetishization and pain/pleasure melding is rendered because of modern consumer-driven capitalism is made quite clear without having to be made at all preachy. Greed was a consistently disturbing novel, but that was completely intentional, and it shakes up expectations in a way I feel works, politically and aesthetically. Also distinguished by great quality of writing and a simply extraordinary command over voice. One of the best Nobel laureates I’ve yet read.
Worse than: The Sleepwalkers by Hermann Broch
Better than: The New Life by Orhan Damuk
The New Life
Orhan Damuk
Noblel Laureate. Awesome book, extremely engaging, unique, fast moving and funny. Starts with a teenage Turkish boy reading a specific book. It transforms his life, launches him on some rather cult-like devotion to the text, and also propells him on a road trip across Turkey. A lot of fast-faced ssatire and engaging encounters depicting modern life ensue. The characterization is pitch perfect, and carries with a lot of energy and inherent interest. The plot was engaging, at the edge of incoherent, but ultimately felt strong. Very little complaint here, and I enjoyed it in a way that makes it difficult to really pick apart or analyze extensively.
Better than: Detective Story by Imre Kertesz
Worse than: Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
Noblel Laureate. Awesome book, extremely engaging, unique, fast moving and funny. Starts with a teenage Turkish boy reading a specific book. It transforms his life, launches him on some rather cult-like devotion to the text, and also propells him on a road trip across Turkey. A lot of fast-faced ssatire and engaging encounters depicting modern life ensue. The characterization is pitch perfect, and carries with a lot of energy and inherent interest. The plot was engaging, at the edge of incoherent, but ultimately felt strong. Very little complaint here, and I enjoyed it in a way that makes it difficult to really pick apart or analyze extensively.
Better than: Detective Story by Imre Kertesz
Worse than: Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
Detective Story
Imre Kertesz
Noberl laureate. Slim volume here, really more of a novella than a novel. Focuses in on an aspect of political repression particularly in the Latin American context, studying a tale of police surveillance, arrest, torture and death. Much of the distinctive approach comes from centering the narrative not on the victims destroyed by the process but on some of the perpetrators, raising questions of how apparently conventional men can implement and facilitate this grim bureaucratic mechanism. There are some effective moments where the sheer everday nature of the repressive horror draws focus. On the whole, however, I’d say this element remains underdeveloped. Partly as a function of the length of the book, which raises a lot of questions but doesn’t fully express any of them. As well, there’s a tendency in the second half of the story whereby the family under surveillance gains more and more of the dramatic attention, to an extent bending the structure of the story uncomfortably.
It remains a well written acount with lots of striking moments and some effectively expressed themes, but the book is in the end feels slightly underwhelming, not as intense as it feels like it could be. On the evidence of this book Kertesz is clearly a competent writer, but it’s nt yet clear to be if he’s a great one.
Better than: Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said by Philip K. Dick
Worse than: Love and Shadows by Isabel Allende
Noberl laureate. Slim volume here, really more of a novella than a novel. Focuses in on an aspect of political repression particularly in the Latin American context, studying a tale of police surveillance, arrest, torture and death. Much of the distinctive approach comes from centering the narrative not on the victims destroyed by the process but on some of the perpetrators, raising questions of how apparently conventional men can implement and facilitate this grim bureaucratic mechanism. There are some effective moments where the sheer everday nature of the repressive horror draws focus. On the whole, however, I’d say this element remains underdeveloped. Partly as a function of the length of the book, which raises a lot of questions but doesn’t fully express any of them. As well, there’s a tendency in the second half of the story whereby the family under surveillance gains more and more of the dramatic attention, to an extent bending the structure of the story uncomfortably.
It remains a well written acount with lots of striking moments and some effectively expressed themes, but the book is in the end feels slightly underwhelming, not as intense as it feels like it could be. On the evidence of this book Kertesz is clearly a competent writer, but it’s nt yet clear to be if he’s a great one.
Better than: Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said by Philip K. Dick
Worse than: Love and Shadows by Isabel Allende
Growth of the Soil
Knut Hamsun
Nobel Laureate. The novel is a six hundred page Norwegian farming epic written in the early twentieth century. Based on that description I wasn’t expecting a thrilling experience in reading this book, and this lowered expecation was largely fulfilled. It’s a serious, reflective and fairly ambitious novel, it is however also quite dull. The plot is framed by not much happening, and having the larger narrative revolve around the weather makes for a rather focused absence of tension. Much of the happening stuff in the book involves the marriage of the two main characters, yet it’s here that the book has it’s biggest point of failure. The two are fairly believable, and aren’t without some complexity, but they just aren’t varied or engaging enough to sustain the kind of close narrative presence that they occupy for hundreds of pages on end. It’s not an absence of more conflict that makes for a problem, rather a sense that there needs to be a bit more depth in the personalities, or at least having their existing character be staggered a bit more. As is, too much of their mentalities come across on the surface level, leading to a less than thrilling processing of inhabiting alongside them in the novel.
There are sparks of an ambitious and substantive book, in particular with the indications of technological change, social challenge and technological implementation. It’s precisely in the picture of a non-static, transformative cultural experience that the book makes its most distinctive and valuable statement. Showing remote agricultural life as part of the disorienting change of modernity without featuring it being demolished wholescale is an interesting shift, and it’s particularly intriguing how the State is represented. In the twentieth century Norwegian context it’s one of the more bland and non-belligerant structures around, yet it’s still shown as having major disruptive influence and tends to be regarded, not unreasonably, as a significant problem by the terms of conventional life. Such elements offer some value and make the book not without its compensations, but at core it’s character-driven narrative has major aesthetic problems that it never fully overcomes.
Worse than: The Sleepwalkers by Hermann Broch
Better than: Effi Briest by Theodor Fontane
Nobel Laureate. The novel is a six hundred page Norwegian farming epic written in the early twentieth century. Based on that description I wasn’t expecting a thrilling experience in reading this book, and this lowered expecation was largely fulfilled. It’s a serious, reflective and fairly ambitious novel, it is however also quite dull. The plot is framed by not much happening, and having the larger narrative revolve around the weather makes for a rather focused absence of tension. Much of the happening stuff in the book involves the marriage of the two main characters, yet it’s here that the book has it’s biggest point of failure. The two are fairly believable, and aren’t without some complexity, but they just aren’t varied or engaging enough to sustain the kind of close narrative presence that they occupy for hundreds of pages on end. It’s not an absence of more conflict that makes for a problem, rather a sense that there needs to be a bit more depth in the personalities, or at least having their existing character be staggered a bit more. As is, too much of their mentalities come across on the surface level, leading to a less than thrilling processing of inhabiting alongside them in the novel.
There are sparks of an ambitious and substantive book, in particular with the indications of technological change, social challenge and technological implementation. It’s precisely in the picture of a non-static, transformative cultural experience that the book makes its most distinctive and valuable statement. Showing remote agricultural life as part of the disorienting change of modernity without featuring it being demolished wholescale is an interesting shift, and it’s particularly intriguing how the State is represented. In the twentieth century Norwegian context it’s one of the more bland and non-belligerant structures around, yet it’s still shown as having major disruptive influence and tends to be regarded, not unreasonably, as a significant problem by the terms of conventional life. Such elements offer some value and make the book not without its compensations, but at core it’s character-driven narrative has major aesthetic problems that it never fully overcomes.
Worse than: The Sleepwalkers by Hermann Broch
Better than: Effi Briest by Theodor Fontane
The Appointment
by Herta Muller
Nobel Laureate. Moody, atmosphereic piece. Rather short and at tines a bit difficult to follow, but overall engaging. Makes a great approach to representing the tangled materiality and subdued political consciousness of Communist Romania. Overall I was quite a fan of the prose, and the book made a good way to pass the time. It lacked a bit of extra oomph that would carry in into being truly great and on the strenght of just this work I’m not sure if Muller deserve’s Nobel Laureate status, but I’m intrigued enough to probably give one of her longer books a try at some point.
Worse than: The Good Terrorist by Doris Lessing
Better than: Blindness by Jose Saramago
Nobel Laureate. Moody, atmosphereic piece. Rather short and at tines a bit difficult to follow, but overall engaging. Makes a great approach to representing the tangled materiality and subdued political consciousness of Communist Romania. Overall I was quite a fan of the prose, and the book made a good way to pass the time. It lacked a bit of extra oomph that would carry in into being truly great and on the strenght of just this work I’m not sure if Muller deserve’s Nobel Laureate status, but I’m intrigued enough to probably give one of her longer books a try at some point.
Worse than: The Good Terrorist by Doris Lessing
Better than: Blindness by Jose Saramago
Blindness
by Jose Saramago
Nobel Laureate. Takes a rather strange premise for ’high literary fiction’, in a sort that if written by an unknown would be most profitably marketed as fantasy and since it’s a well known author is probably classified as magical realism. It explores a scneario by which a communicable disease of white-seeing blindness disrupts society, showing metaphorical and physical blindness as it fragments and reforms human society. The main emotion of the book is a single imagined situation of communal abandonment and incapacity writ large, imagining a literal kindgom of the blind emerging with a rather grim viewpoint and a highly visceral standpoint imaging the material damge inflicted by people on each other.
The novel is well written, with some very intense scenes and interesting structure in the theme of general human inhumanity. The structure of the book is awkward for its subject matter, though--third person view rather than first, distancing the text from the strength of the experiences, and there are some troubling things in its representation of gender. Unique, interesting and powerful, but ultimately an underwhelming piece, and one I wouldn't recommend.
Worse than: The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham
Better than: Wake by Robert J. Sawyer
Nobel Laureate. Takes a rather strange premise for ’high literary fiction’, in a sort that if written by an unknown would be most profitably marketed as fantasy and since it’s a well known author is probably classified as magical realism. It explores a scneario by which a communicable disease of white-seeing blindness disrupts society, showing metaphorical and physical blindness as it fragments and reforms human society. The main emotion of the book is a single imagined situation of communal abandonment and incapacity writ large, imagining a literal kindgom of the blind emerging with a rather grim viewpoint and a highly visceral standpoint imaging the material damge inflicted by people on each other.
The novel is well written, with some very intense scenes and interesting structure in the theme of general human inhumanity. The structure of the book is awkward for its subject matter, though--third person view rather than first, distancing the text from the strength of the experiences, and there are some troubling things in its representation of gender. Unique, interesting and powerful, but ultimately an underwhelming piece, and one I wouldn't recommend.
Worse than: The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham
Better than: Wake by Robert J. Sawyer
Monday, June 28, 2010
The Good Terrorist
by Doris Lessing
Part of my reading of Nobel laureates. Very good piece of writing, brings up the claustrophobic, dysfunctional and materially stark situation of a particular subgroup. It’s one of those stories that is so clearly about a single specific time and location, making it clear the claims of the narrative don’t transfer anywhere else. And yet the picture is complex and engaging enough within that to have some very effective insights into broader human nature, how other groups conduct themselves similarly to this one, in degree or in whole. The main insight is sociological, yet it benefits from an imagined situation rather than a purely historical one, using the historical context to flesh out imagined specifics for a wider insight into larger human patterns. It’s not in any way science fiction, but as a novel shares some of the same virtues as good science fiction does in making the ambigious clear and the clear more ambigious through intensive imagination.
The protagonist was deeply and intensely irritating. Self-righteous, ignorant, willing to use violence on behalf of political ideology she didn’t really understand. That was definitely the point, and the core unreliability and psychologically flawed nature of her forms much of the basic energy of the book. Going through the book in her head isn’t always comfortable but it is substantive, and by the end feels like a real gain in reading to have experienced it. Nor is it only a matter of pointing and laughing at the crazy person--there is enough in there to point up to common patterns of disconnect that are simply magnified her. When the protagonist falls into line with talk of class warfare and bombings but then insists on going to her mother for help there’s a measure of simultaneous isolation from the world and dependence on it that’s breath taking and, in some measure, is quite typical. Similarly the fact that she’s for all her issues in many ways the most practical and functionally necessary of the group paints a fascinating picture of a petty ideological terrorist cell. In its own sake, the tragicomedy of this communist splinter group seeking a tactical alliance with the IRA and eventually undertaking its own private, bungled, bombings is a thing of dark beatufy to see unfold.
Above all, what Lesing does very well is in material descriptions, bringing the solidity, appeal and squalor of everyday objects home.
Better than: Something Out There by Nadine Gordimer
Worse than: The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
Part of my reading of Nobel laureates. Very good piece of writing, brings up the claustrophobic, dysfunctional and materially stark situation of a particular subgroup. It’s one of those stories that is so clearly about a single specific time and location, making it clear the claims of the narrative don’t transfer anywhere else. And yet the picture is complex and engaging enough within that to have some very effective insights into broader human nature, how other groups conduct themselves similarly to this one, in degree or in whole. The main insight is sociological, yet it benefits from an imagined situation rather than a purely historical one, using the historical context to flesh out imagined specifics for a wider insight into larger human patterns. It’s not in any way science fiction, but as a novel shares some of the same virtues as good science fiction does in making the ambigious clear and the clear more ambigious through intensive imagination.
The protagonist was deeply and intensely irritating. Self-righteous, ignorant, willing to use violence on behalf of political ideology she didn’t really understand. That was definitely the point, and the core unreliability and psychologically flawed nature of her forms much of the basic energy of the book. Going through the book in her head isn’t always comfortable but it is substantive, and by the end feels like a real gain in reading to have experienced it. Nor is it only a matter of pointing and laughing at the crazy person--there is enough in there to point up to common patterns of disconnect that are simply magnified her. When the protagonist falls into line with talk of class warfare and bombings but then insists on going to her mother for help there’s a measure of simultaneous isolation from the world and dependence on it that’s breath taking and, in some measure, is quite typical. Similarly the fact that she’s for all her issues in many ways the most practical and functionally necessary of the group paints a fascinating picture of a petty ideological terrorist cell. In its own sake, the tragicomedy of this communist splinter group seeking a tactical alliance with the IRA and eventually undertaking its own private, bungled, bombings is a thing of dark beatufy to see unfold.
Above all, what Lesing does very well is in material descriptions, bringing the solidity, appeal and squalor of everyday objects home.
Better than: Something Out There by Nadine Gordimer
Worse than: The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
Tar Baby
by Toni Morrison
An interrogation of masculinity in connection with race, delivered as always with Morrison with beautiful wriitng and high concept storytelling. Specifically it’s a focus on the position of black men in the story, and the way they relate to black women and white society, poising a number of nuanced and complex facets of the main relationship. Specifically strong is the way fear and repression operate in relation to the politics of the body, and the varying first impressions produced.
This book had a wonderfully immersive pattern of characterization, developing highly complex and believable people and then making their perspectives highly legible. It’s the type of writing that stands out even among top tie literary authors, and proves that above and beyond the useful social message Morrison’s Nobel Prize in Literature was fully deserved, page by page. On the whole I found something a bit less satisfying about this book, however. While I fully believed in the characters andn their tangled relatioships I didn’t similarly believe in the story, some aspects of it seemed under-developed and even hard to follow, similarly the transitions in perspective were at times a bit jarring and rendered this a somewhat less engaging and productive text than I had anticipated. It’s still a success, but not a completely unreserved one, and I certainly feel Morrison has done better.
Worse than: Sula by Toni Morrison
Better than: To Late the Philantrope by Alan Paton
An interrogation of masculinity in connection with race, delivered as always with Morrison with beautiful wriitng and high concept storytelling. Specifically it’s a focus on the position of black men in the story, and the way they relate to black women and white society, poising a number of nuanced and complex facets of the main relationship. Specifically strong is the way fear and repression operate in relation to the politics of the body, and the varying first impressions produced.
This book had a wonderfully immersive pattern of characterization, developing highly complex and believable people and then making their perspectives highly legible. It’s the type of writing that stands out even among top tie literary authors, and proves that above and beyond the useful social message Morrison’s Nobel Prize in Literature was fully deserved, page by page. On the whole I found something a bit less satisfying about this book, however. While I fully believed in the characters andn their tangled relatioships I didn’t similarly believe in the story, some aspects of it seemed under-developed and even hard to follow, similarly the transitions in perspective were at times a bit jarring and rendered this a somewhat less engaging and productive text than I had anticipated. It’s still a success, but not a completely unreserved one, and I certainly feel Morrison has done better.
Worse than: Sula by Toni Morrison
Better than: To Late the Philantrope by Alan Paton
Sunday, June 27, 2010
The Master of Go
by Yasunari Kawabata, 181 pages
Nobel Laureate. This slim work featurs a character study of the titular figure, as enacting and being embodied in an epic game of Go. This particular game, built up to and then shown in high amount of detail, is between the aging Master and a young up and comer, and the clashing of styles becomes an embodiment of different generations and underlying philosophies more than individual personalities.
The best testiment I can give to the book is that, although I don’t really understand Go and have little enthusiasm for this general cultural form, I still found the book extremely intense and even exciting. For all that the conflict is born from a long-thought out board game challenge done in a largely amicable encounter the author effectively conveys a sense of high stakes and considerable momentum behind the events of the story. Through small little character details and a lot of beautiful language the novel becomes ultimately gripping and powerful, and its way of embodying the main questions of age, memory, change and ritual is effective.
In reading this work I was reminded a lot of Banks’ The Player of Games, and the science fictional enactment of a very similar scenario. The main differences, beyond the presence of a genre context and associated invented future, are that Banks’ work has it more of a face off between an insider to a depicted society and an outsider to it, and that the issue of politics is explicitly centered. In fact, The Master of Go has almost no direct reference to politics, and largely plays out its form of contrast on a more cultural and aesthetic inter-generational level. This absence appears odd, given the book is written in the 70s and set int he 30s, given how the process of Japanese imperialism and the war went there seems a lot of rich potential to bring in that angle of a conflict between old and new.
Nevertheless, what we get in this book is appealing and worthwhile, due in large part to the command over the story and the simple yet well-formed prose by which it is expressed.
Worse than: The Player of Games by Iain M. Banks
Better than: The Last Hawk by Catherien Asaro
Nobel Laureate. This slim work featurs a character study of the titular figure, as enacting and being embodied in an epic game of Go. This particular game, built up to and then shown in high amount of detail, is between the aging Master and a young up and comer, and the clashing of styles becomes an embodiment of different generations and underlying philosophies more than individual personalities.
The best testiment I can give to the book is that, although I don’t really understand Go and have little enthusiasm for this general cultural form, I still found the book extremely intense and even exciting. For all that the conflict is born from a long-thought out board game challenge done in a largely amicable encounter the author effectively conveys a sense of high stakes and considerable momentum behind the events of the story. Through small little character details and a lot of beautiful language the novel becomes ultimately gripping and powerful, and its way of embodying the main questions of age, memory, change and ritual is effective.
In reading this work I was reminded a lot of Banks’ The Player of Games, and the science fictional enactment of a very similar scenario. The main differences, beyond the presence of a genre context and associated invented future, are that Banks’ work has it more of a face off between an insider to a depicted society and an outsider to it, and that the issue of politics is explicitly centered. In fact, The Master of Go has almost no direct reference to politics, and largely plays out its form of contrast on a more cultural and aesthetic inter-generational level. This absence appears odd, given the book is written in the 70s and set int he 30s, given how the process of Japanese imperialism and the war went there seems a lot of rich potential to bring in that angle of a conflict between old and new.
Nevertheless, what we get in this book is appealing and worthwhile, due in large part to the command over the story and the simple yet well-formed prose by which it is expressed.
Worse than: The Player of Games by Iain M. Banks
Better than: The Last Hawk by Catherien Asaro
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