My best fiction reads of 2011

Of the 40-odd works of fiction I read in 2011 I'm going to name some favorites. I'm still working on Ben Lerner's Leaving the Atocha Station, we'll see if I have time to finish it and write about it. This year, I won't break this group into further sub-genres as the representation of YA fantasy, classic literature, or short works are not significant enough. The original reviews are linked to each title, with an excerpt below. My favorite novels this past year were:

The Story of the Night - Colm Toibin
Colm Toibin's 1996 The Story of the Night is a multi-strand coming-of-age novel. In it, Richard, a young gay man in 1980s Buenos Aires comes into himself, learning to love and shedding his naivete so as to operate successfully in the changing political landscape of his country. Argentina tries to grows up to become a playing partner in the international political and economic community. Gay life in Western culture comes out of the closet - in some ways by dint of political determination and to some degree it is forced out by illness. Toibin's three stories meet in the person of Richard. The Story of the Night is compulsively readable, not because the political story is an entertaining thriller, as the blurbs claim. I find Toibin's skill more subtle (or his talent more blatant) in that he takes a rich intellectual understanding of the politic landscape and writes plot of political complexity, keeping its events clear as well as tension-filled. At the same time, he writes a gay love story straight from the heart, that is uncliched, full of character-driven details.

Reading in the Dark - Seamus Deane
Deane renders the indignation of a child who knows he is excluded from the mysteries of adulthood with great conviction. In the case of this novel, these are not just the work-a-day mysteries of sexual relations or violence considered too great for a child's understanding. Our first-person narrator is aware of deep secrets that rule the internecine feuds within his family, secrets of informing and murder that haunt his parents' every waking action. They flavor his life like a strong spice one can taste in every bite of a stew and yet not know what it is. He learns the full story in dribs and drabs, sometimes from unknowing truth-tellers. Deane's talent, is withholding it from his reader as well in such a fashion that the not unfamiliar story of an Irish childhood becomes riddled with suspense, and his coming of age filled with the regret that accompanies the realization that being excluded from this knowledge is no less tormenting than possessing it... Some of his paragraphs could be sung, so beautiful are the processions of simple words that accomplish his rich and deeply-felt descriptions. This memoir-like novel is tinged with deep sadness, but the way Deane renders his story is shear pleasure.

A Long Long Way - Sebastian Barry
What Barry makes most plain in this beautiful book is the confusion and the utter waste of war, even in the case of a noble cause. It ruins the men (and now women) who fight it, the earth under them, the families they left behind. It ruins lives not even totally formed yet. One of its great tragedies, this book tells us, is that it ruins boys before they ever grow up enough to know their own minds.

To the End of the Land - David Grossman
When Ora's son Ofer decides to stay beyond his required military service in the Israeli army to serve in an important military mission rather than hike with her in the Galilee, Ora feels hurt and deserted. She commandeers Avram, her husband's best friend and her old love, who has been living on the fringes since his capture and torture in the Yom Kippur War, to hike with her in a desperate act of avoidance. If she is not there to receive the news that Ofer has been killed, she reasons, he is not dead. She can indefinitely keep him alive by telling the stories of Ofer, his brother Adam, his father Ilan, and herself, to Avram. This is story telling as an act of defense. People approached with love are bottomless, says David Grossman's powerful new novel, no matter how much you know, there is still more.

Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
Hardy's last and greatest novel (I think) tells us that people beg for conventions to resolve paradoxes inherent to human nature. They substitute them for deep and independent thinking because they find it so hard to live in the presence of more than one truth. Hardy is not just talking about the uneducated worker, but also of scholars and clergy - the learned men of his time. And when a few enlightened souls discover that they can have richer, happier lives by refusing to substitute convention for lives of courageous independence, those who crave the comforts of convention make sure that they're miserable for trying to do so.

A Change of Climate - Hilary Mantel
Kit... lives in a world in which people are divided into good souls and sad cases. The strength of Hilary Mantel's 1994 novel is that she is not one of the people to so divide the world. This novel is political and domestic, it is ruthless and tender, but it is never preachy. It is comfortable with its contradictions.

Angel - Elizabeth Taylor
Angel is a brilliant study in self-deception. It is wickedly satiric, and a wonderful psychological study of someone who escapes from the pain of the world with fantasy so successfully that she sees no reason to ever leave her hiding place. On the flip-side, however, Angel is also what happens when education amounts to nothing more than learning the minimal skills necessary to make one's living, rather than opening up the student to the possibilities the world has to offer. The adults in Angel's world were all bashed down to size by their circumstances, so they think it practical to curtail their children's dreams to protect them from disappointment...

The Road - Cormac McCarthy
The father and son who are the book's main characters live isolated in a cold, damp scab of a world where there is little sustenance, the other beings are few and impossible to predict, but usually violent, and where the only rule is to survive. But, my gosh, the writing is enveloping to the point of blotting almost all else out, the love between the two characters is deeply moving, and the impression this novel left is indelible.


I don't really see a need to declare a solitary "winner" among this group. The Road and To the End of the Land perhaps stand out among these strong, rich, and humane novels for their sheer indelibility. Looking back on these eight novels, I really had a year of robust and fulfilling reading! The bar is set high for 2012. May you all have a rich and involving year in reading and otherwise.

BIG books in 2012 - (The Tea & Books Reading Challenge)

For Birgit (and her hero C.S. Lewis) size matters, which is why she has posed the Tea & Books Reading Challenge, which demands that we tackle 2 or more books that are 700 pages in length or greater. I am joining at the Berry Tea Devotee level, meaning I intend to complete 4 of these books before Dec. 31 2012. Given that my TBR pile already has five on these monsters, I don't even have to abandon C.B.'s Double-Dare to do it. I thought I had even more, but two of the long books I wanted to tackle this year were both in the neighborhood of 680 pages. As I will be writing my dissertation this year, reading a few books this length will remind me how short the piece of writing I'm producing actually is. I plan to choose from the tomes below:

Gustav Mahler - Jens Malte Fischer

1Q84 - Haruki Murakami

In Europe - Geert Mak

A People's Tragedy - Orlando Figes

and if I can manage it, Simon Callow's massive two-volume biography of Orson Welles The Road to Xanadu and Hello Americans that Sheila gave me about two years ago. It's not the length that intimidates me, it's Callows obsessional enthusiasm expressed in page-long run-on paragraphs with tiny little margins.

and...evidently, I have added Charles Dickens's Our Mutual Friend.

My best non-fiction reads of 2011

Now it is time for my annual best reads lists of 2011. I will choose from just two categories this year - fiction and non-fiction, beginning here with non-fiction. I read 25 works of non-fiction including the genres of memoir, science, and history/politics. I won't count re-reads, such as two works of Joan Didion's I revisited, as they were re-read because they are favorites. The original reviews are linked to each title, although I excerpt them below. The most memorable given these criteria were:

Survival in Auschwitz - Primo Levi
In 1943 Italian chemist Primo Levi, a Jew, was captured by the Fascist Militia and eventually transported to Auschwitz in 1944, where he somehow survived until the end of World War II. His Survival in Auschwitz, written just a year later, is, on its surface, a remarkably dispassionate document. It records the conditions under which he and his fellow inmates lived to remind the German people, he wrote in his first preface to the book, what they had done, and it is a portrait of people in extremis - what occupies their thoughts, their code of behavior, how they survive, and how they die. To accomplish this he circumscribes the scope of his job (like any good artist)...The way Levi sets his limits allows him to think enough to engage in the act of writing and permits us the possibility of reading it without simply contemplating a void of infinite horror.

The Mind's Eye - Oliver Sacks
Each chapter in this latest collection focuses on a person whose visual system is somehow compromised or enhanced. ..The characters of The Mind's Eye include a pianist who loses the ability to read music, a mystery writer who looses the ability to read words (but not to write them), and several people who are selectively blind for faces but not necessarily for other classes of objects...Whether exploring case studies, the evolution of neuroscience, or more recent avances, Sacks's writing is probing, accessible, and humane in The Mind's Eye.

The Beak of the Finch - Jonathan Weiner
...a rich book detailing the work that evolutionary biologists Peter and Rosemary Grant have done on the Galapagos Islands. They have observed Darwin's theory of natural selection play out again and again and, in some cases, even observed how new species evolve, by watching the islands' famous finches...Aside from the pleasure of his lucid writing, Weiner elucidates the development of Darwin's own thinking as well as integrating his original work with that of contemporary scientists observing the forces of evolution in action. This book makes plain the great theory's relevance to the natural world in which we live and also reveals the unbelievable drudgery of painstaking observational field work.

The Emperor - Ryszard Kapuscinski
The Emperor (1978) was Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski's first book. It is a distinctive blend of political writing, razor sharp psychological portraiture via oral history, and prose that achieves lyricism. It's three brief sections describe the absurd class structure of Ethiopia during the reign of Haile Selassie, Emperor from the 1930s to the 1970s, the foment of rebellion against it, and its eventual downfall, not exactly the expected forum for poetical insight.

The Memory Chalet - Tony Judt
While reading this as the literate reflection of a thinker about history, politics, and class I could not help also seeing it as a metaphor for a free thinker subjected to the tyranny of physical paralysis. I tore through the 200-plus pages of these succinct, erudite and moving essays. I cannot advocate strongly enough for The Memory Chalet as a rich reading experience


These five books were each memorable for their skill at immersing the reader in a world not our own. Sometimes the focus was more on imparting information and other times evoking experience but Tony Judt's memoir The Memory Chalet was remarkable for the way it integrated these two functions completely while making the reading of the prose urgent. It is a stand-out among all the books I read this year.

Living in the World but in Exile from Almost Everyplace (Books - Open City by Teju Cole)

Teju Cole's Open City received strong responses from crack critics and fellow bloggers and made a number of Top 10 fiction lists for the year, persuading me to check it out. In it Julius, a Nigerian immigrant to America who is completing his final year of psychiatry residency at Columbia, walks the streets of New York City. Although the book is short, it does not invite quick reading. The emphasis is not on any sort of plot, but the novel seethes with ideas and scenes of humanity, otherworldly fantasy, and terrific tension.

The form of Open City is a flaneur's diary, only in the case of Julius, his strolls are not idle. He seems to be running from something. Coles's evocation of the complexity and aggression of the city strongly evoked Dostoevsky, but his stream-of-consciousness prose reminded me most of Virginia Woolf as she portrays the inner journey of Clarissa Dalloway by allowing us to trail her as she runs errands in preparation for her dinner party. Cole's novel follows Julius's movements while revealing his experience, mostly related to identity, as it intersects with geography, politics, and culture. The rhythm of Julius's movement is more desultory than Clarissa's and his task less directed. Julius collects information and regales us with his knowledge - about early Dutch settlers treatment of Native Americans, the music of Gustav Mahler, the photography Martin Munkacsi. The writing lingers in this empirical data but knowledge is not necessarily connection, and Julius's experience is one of exile. This, as I read it, was the theme of Open City - not merely exile from one's place of birth, true for both Julius and for Cole - but also the sense of exile experienced by groups which society has decided to set apart by creating different expectations of them. Cole discusses the experiences of blacks in America, Muslims in America and northern Europe, jews, Palestinians, and gay people, and Cole provokes the reader's expectations of what qualities their identities should confer upon his characters, sometimes by meeting typical s expectations of them and at other times by defeating them. If you're black you're supposed to be a thug, not a doctor, certainly not a Mahler lover. If you are gay, you're supposed to be a club boy, not an octogenarian Asian physician...and blacks are all brothers to each other - aren't they?

At the almost empty subway station, there was a family of out-of-towners waiting for the train. A girl of thirteen sat on the bench next to me. Her ten-year-old brother came to join her. They were out of earshot of their parents who, save one or two unconcerned glances in our direction, were absorbed in their own conversation. Her mister, she said, turning to me, wassup? She made signs with her fingers and, with her brother, started laughing. The little boy wore an imitation Chinese peasant's hat. They had been mimicking slanted eyes and exaggerated bows before they came to where I was. They now both turned to me. Are you a gangster, mister? Are you a gangster? They both flashed gang signs, or their idea of gang signs. I looked at them. It was midnight, and I didn't feel like giving public lectures. He's black, said the girl but he's not dressed like a gangster. I bet he's a gangster, her brother said. I bet he is. Hey mister, are you a gangster?

And then, only pages later...

Not good, not good at all, you know, the way you came into my car without saying hello, that was bad. Hey, I'm African just like you, why you do this? He kept me in his sights in the mirror. I was confused, I said, I'm so sorry about it, my mind was elsewhere, don't be offended, ehn, my brother, how are you doing? He said nothing and faced the road. I wasn't sorry at all. I was in no mood for people who tried to lay claims on me...

Initially, I was unsure as to whether I was reading a fictionalized pastiche of Teju Cole's life and little mini-lectures on every magazine article or museum exhibit he was obsessed with at the moment of writing it, or whether I was reading fiction. I came to understand this novel as fiction and then admire its artistry, even if its origins are partly autobiographical, because Cole's writing makes it clear that he has greater insight into Julius than Julius does himself, because his walks accumulate meaning that is greater than the sum of the individual episodes, and because my very confusion between writer and narrator became obvious in time as the book's artifice.

Despite the largely meditative tone, there were some striking moments, including Julius's encounters with his memorably written friend and mentor, Dr. Saito, and a particularly dramatic scene during which Julius, trying to exit Carnegie Hall, gets locked out on the roof. Here, he is suspended between the heavens he can see on that cold clear night from the roof, and the wailing sirens on the street he may fall on to, the mundanity of practical life and the ephemera of Mahler's Ninth Symphony, here, he tells us, he faced a "solitude of rare purity," an arresting evocation of of the complex state we come to recognize as Julius's.

In a visit Julius makes to Brussels, we learn that...

...there had been no firebombing of Bruges, or Ghent, or Brussels. Surrender, of course, played a role in this form of survival, as did negotiation with invading powers. Had Brussels's rulers not opted to declare it an open city and thereby exempt it from bombardment during the Second World War, it might have been reduced to rubble. It might have been another Dresden. As it was, it had remained a vision of the medieval and baroque periods, a vista interrupted only by the architectural monstrosities erected all over town by Leopold II in the late nineteenth century.

During my visit, the mild winter weather and the old stones lay a melancholy siege on the city. It was, in some ways, like a city in waiting...

Julius may seek freedom from burdensome ties in the comfort of information, however, he too seems to live his life in waiting. Contemporary global culture may offer the potential for previously unseen interactions and opportunities but it confers upon modern life almost unfathomable complexity. Coles's novel is a thoughtful meditation on a paradoxical sense of exile that arises in a thoughtful modern man living in just such a world - our world.

Taking on the Double-Dare

Hope you have had a happy holiday - whatever you like celebrating - christmas, chanukah, kwanza, the winter solstice. Now enough singing songs, snacking, toasts, and boardgames, let's get down to the business of reading. C.B. has double-dared us to read only from the TBR pile from December 31, 2011 until April 1, 2012 and I am taking him up on it. See that picture in the challenge icon? That gets pretty close to my TBR stacks and the holidays have only added to it, with enticing copies of Leaving the Atocha Station, and the recent biographies of Catherine The Great and Gustav Mahler courtesy of my in-laws. Although C.B. has not sworn us to not purchasing new books in that time frame, I am even thinking of trying to do that (ha, ha, who are you kidding?). If you care to join us, click on the words double-dared in the third sentence to link to C.B.'s challenge.

2011 - A little end of the year accounting...

In preparation for my soon-to-come best-of lists, I always like to do a little end of the year accounting. I know some people find this ludicrous but I love looking back on the year and categorizing what I have read. I have been aiming for an average of one book per week, which has been a stretch in the past three years with my class reading requirements, however this fall I no longer had classes. The result was that I was able to finish a few more books. Even though I plan to read several more books this year, lets see how the numbers look so far.

2011
Total books read so far: 65

fiction: 40

written in the last 11 years: 27
written in the 20th century: 12
written prior to the 20th century: 1
graphic novels: 1
fantasy/sci fi: 3
written for young readers: 2

non-fiction:25

essays (misc): 2
biography: 2
memoir: 7
history/politics: 8
science/psychology: 11

written by women/men: 24/41
written in English/read in translation: 57/8

Not a bad year so far.

A monument to hope in the midst of the apocalypse (Books - The Road by Cormac McCarthy)

It took me two years to work up to reading Cormac McCarthy's The Road after a friend recommended it. I just wasn't craving post-apocalyptic winter. The anticipatory cloud lifted one day and I no longer felt that I would not be able to appreciate the writing or story for the setting. This little personal anecdote befits the book, having now read it, as it is about our worst fears realized. The father and son who are the book's main characters live isolated in a cold, damp scab of a world where there is little sustenance, the other beings are few and impossible to predict, but usually violent, and where the only rule is to survive. But, my gosh, the writing is enveloping to the point of blotting almost all else out, the love between the two characters is deeply moving, and the impression this novel left is indelible.

I have read McCarthy's The Crossing and was nonplussed with how he could mix old testament gravitas,Western American grit, and deep, elemental emotion. Here, he one-ups even that one experience of his work I have had, by adding economy. This is not because being spare is inherently better writing, but rather because it suits the scarcity of his bleak imagined universe.

When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he'd reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him. Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one that what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world. His hand rose and fell softly with each precious breath. He pushed away the plastic tarpaulin and raised himself in the stinking robes and blankets and looked toward the east for any light but there was none. In the dream from which he'd wakened he had wandered in a cave where the child had led him by the hand. Their light playing over the wet flowstone walls. Like pilgrims in a fable swallowed up and lost among the inward parts of some granitic beast. Deep stone flues where the water dripped and sang. Tolling in the silence the minutes of the earth and the hours and the days of it and the years without cease. Until they stood in a great stone room where lay a black and ancient lake. And on the far shore a creature that raised its dripping mouth from the rimstone pool and stared in the light with eyes dead white and sightless as the eggs of spiders. It swung its head low over the water as if to take the scent of what it could not see. Crouching there pale and naked and translucent, its alabaster bones cast up in shadow on the rocks behind it. Its bowels, its beating heart. The brain that pulsed in a dull glass bell. It swung its head from side to side and then gave out a low moan and turned and lurched away and loped soundlessly into the dark.

In this opening paragraph McCarthy uses four of the five senses. The word 'glaucoma' is employed as a simile for the experience of a character we haven't even met - creating a striking impression of impending death and darkness. Sentences later he adds 'eyes dead white and sightless as the eggs of spiders.' Later McCarthy adds 'a blackness to hurt your ears with listening,' and the descriptors 'impenetrable,' and 'autistic' to evoke the characters' experience of the darkness of this world. Before we have met this character, we learn of what he dreamt. I dread reading dreams in most novels because they are generally so telegraphic about what the author would like them to symbolize instead of, as McCarthy does here, conveying character, circumstance, and setting through experience. Dreams may be culturally apprehended as symbols, but when dreamt they are a series of sensory experiences that are only later analyzed for their meaning. In the present, the moment to moment experience of the dream seems clear and sensible. Later we realize some veil hung between us and that world, some unspoken agreement had been made that, as this is a dream, the rules of progression are different and if it is to continue, the rules are to be accepted without question. Because, as the father tells his son, in this Beckettian universe,

You forget what you want to remember and you remember what you want to forget.

Numerous dreams come and go throughout this narrative pointing at both the otherworldliness of life after the great and final mistake of mankind and also the mundanity of life's requirements. Even after the apocalypse we eat and we sleep and we dream. If we are a little child, we must learn the difference between the real world and the world of dreams and between bad dreams and good ones. Even in this world, or perhaps especially in this one, a father must teach his child ethics - which things to value, the respect due other living beings. And even in this deeply damaged universe, the son also teaches his father. Some of the most touching moments in this novel are ones in which the boy's inherent knowledge of what is right is challenged by what his father feels he must do to help them both survive in the extremity of the circumstances. This is an old tale - told often in both classical drama and in modern ones like Arthur Miller's All My Sons or Jon Robin Baitz's Other Desert Cities and A Fair Country. This is one of the sacred roles of parents. You can feel the deep struggle in this man who on the one hand must do everything that he can for his son to survive, even while he knows he is dying, and on the other wants to give him the same things most parents want to give their children - a safe, predictable world of full of goodness and generosity, and kind acts

You wanted to know what the bad guys looked like. Now you know. It may happen again. My job is to take care of you. I was appointed to do that by god. I will kill anyone who touches you. Do you understand?

Yes.

He sat there cowled in the blanket. After a while he looked up. Are we still the good guys? he said.

Yes. We're still the good guys.

And we always will be.

Yes. We always will be.

Okay.

In the morning they came up out of the ravine and took to the road again. He'd carved the boy a flute from a piece of roadside cane and he took it from his coat and gave it to him. The boy took it wordlessly. After a while he fell back and after a while the man could hear him playing. A formless music for the age to come. Or perhaps the last music on earth called up from out of the ashes of its ruin.

What continually amazed me in this story is that a sense of what the world will be and who the boy could be in it is what motivated the actions of the father. He doesn't just sit down and die, he envisions the future and he walks towards it. This is not merely a book, it's a monument.

Revolutionary Improvisation in the Theatre of East Central Europe and Vaclav Havel Remembered (Books - The Magic Lantern by Timothy Garton Ash)

I was going to write about Cormac McCarthy's The Road but world events will postpone that until tomorrow. Amidst daily skirmishes between 'the people' and the armed forces in Egypt, a stunning year of uprising by the people throughout the Middle East including an overthrowing of Gaddafi regime in Libya, and weeks of somewhat more amorphous protests in cities in the U.S., a beacon of such revolutions has died - Czech playwright Vaclav Havel, one of the leaders of the mostly peaceful revolution of 1989 that broke the hold of the Soviet Union on Central Europe. He was a shy man, and so an unlikely revolutionary hero. But, as Timothy Garton Ash's The Magic Lantern, a collection of essays written during the 1989 uprisings in Poland, Hungary, Germany, and Czechoslovakia, makes clear, these were civil uprisings lead by intellectuals and so he became one of the key men of these world changing events.

With the single, signal exception of Romania, these revolutions were also remarkable for the almost complete lack of violence. Like Solidarity in 1980-81 they were that historical contradiction-in-terms, 'peaceful revolution'. No bastilles were stormed, no guillotines erected. Lamp-posts were used only for street-lighting. Romania alone saw tanks and firing squads. Elsewhere the only violence was that used at the outset by police. The young demonstrators in East Berlin and Prague laid candles in front of the police, who responded with truncheons. The Marseillaise of 1989 said not 'aux armes, citoyens' but 'aux bougies [candles], citoyens'. The rationale and tradition of non-violence can be found in the history of all the democratic oppositions of East Central Europe throughout the 1980s. Partly it was pragmatic: the other side had all the weapons. But it was also ethical. It was a statement about how things should be. They wanted to start as they intended to go on. History, said Adam Michnik, had taught them that those who start by storming bastilles will end up building their own.

The ruling elite were brought down by mass demonstrations of workers in the streets but the politics that were born out of them, Garton Ash stresses,

...were made by intellectuals: the playwright Vaclav Havel, the medievalist Bronislaw Geremek, the Catholic editor Tadeusz Mazowiecki, the painter Barbel Bohley in Berlin, the conductor Kurt Masur in Leipzig, the philosophers Janos Kis and Gaspar Miklos Tamas in Budapest, the engineering professor Petre Roman and the poet Mircea Dinescu in Bucharest...As in 1848 the common denominator was ideological.

This book shares the subject matter of Anna Porter's The Ghosts of Europe, which I wrote about a few weeks ago, but while her book offers more historical perspective, having just been written, Garton Ash's, written in the heat of the moment offers an eye-witness account.

I do not pretend to offer a full analysis of Soviet policy, of economic factors, of developments inside the communist parties and governments, let alone of the longer-term causes... To write about 1989 at the beginning of 1990 is perhaps slightly less foolhardy than to write about 1789 at the beginning of 1790; but it is foolhardy enough...My account is largely from inside the opposition movements and from among so-called 'ordinary people' on the streets - and mainly, as the sub-title indicates, the streets of the capital cities. .. The witness can only be in one place at one times, and tends to attach an exaggerated importance to what he personally saw or heard... What happened afterwards changes our view of what went before. The historian usually knows more about what happened afterwards, simply because he writes later. Finally, there is partiality in judgement.

'I am a camera,' said Isherwood. I was not a camera. A camera would not give an election speech in a Silesian coal-mine.

Garton Ash was there as it happened. In the mine with Lech Walesa, walking across the no man's land that sat between the East and West sides of the Berlin wall with some of the first East German citizens to cross legally to the West, and in the Magic Lantern Theatre in Prague with Vaclav Havel (even if they did misspell his name on his Identification badge). As such, this book has the excitement of immediacy, but it is, as Garton Ash writes, not a an account of the consequences but is rather a moment-by-moment evocation of events that, when one looks back, one calls the revolution. The Czechoslovak revolution literally occurred in a theatre and Garton Ash's book makes it clear that these men and women were improvising (this is truly a movement after my own heart) that is they were working through the mess of the moment to reach workable solutions.

Through the heavy metal-and-glass doors, past the second line of volunteer guards, you plunge down a broad flight of stairs into a curving, 1950s style, mirror-lined foyer. People dart around importantly, or sit in little groups on benches, eating improvised canapes and discussing the future of the nation. Down another flight of stairs there is the actual theatre. The set - for Durrenmatt's Minotaurus - is like a funnel, with a hole at the back of the stage just big enough for a small monster to squeeze through. Here, in place of the Magic Lantern's special combination of drama, music and pantomime, they hold the daily press conference: the speakers emerging from the hole deisgned for Durrenmatt's monster. Journalists instead of tourists are let in for the performance.

As one end of the foyer there is a room with a glass wall on which it says, in several languages, 'smoking room'. There is another guard at the door. Some are allowed in. Others not. Flash your magic ticket. In. Familiar bearded faces, old friends from the underground, sit around on rickety chairs, in a crisis meeting. A television mounted high on the wall shows an operetta without the sound. The room smells of cigarette smoke, sweat, damp coats and revolution. I remember the same smell, precisely, from Poland in autumn 1980.

This, you think is the real headquarters. But after a few hours you discover a black door at the other end of the foyer. Through the door you go down a metal stairway into a narrow, desperately overheated corridor, as if into the bowels of an ocean liner. Here, in dressing-rooms ten and eleven, is the very heart of the revolution. For here sits Vaclav Havel, with his 'private secretary' and the few key activists from the Forum who are thrashing out the texts of the latest communique, programmatic statement or negotiating position.

It is in this, the longest chapter in this brief book, that we go into the belly of the beast, and it is here that I thought as I read, that this book could serve as an inspirational manual for the foundering Occupy Wall Street movement. One can see, smell, and taste, how these thinkers became doers. How they kept the ear of both the public and the rulers by working through the mess of their own separate opinions to communicate something coherent and, ultimately, useful. Although, as the concluding chapter smartly posits, living under Soviet rule so long may have given the movement a leg-up in that it created a solidarity of "the people."

Garton Ash's The Magic Lantern is an exciting and topical first-hand account. It led me to add Havel's own Memoir To the Castle and Back and de Tocqueville's classic Democracy in America to my reading list and it is a fittingly dramatic way to appreciate the important contribution that Vaclav Havel made to changing the political geography of Europe. If you would like a further detailed appreciation of Havel's role in the Czech revolution, my friend Sheila did an excellent post.

Ugly Betty meets Serpico in a parody of a mockery of justice (Books - From the Memoirs of a Non-Enemy Combatant by Alex Gilvarry)

On the last day of American military presence in Iraq, it's appropriate that I should have just finished From the Memoirs of a non-Enemy Combatant an incisive satire, part-political part-social, and the first novel of Alex Gilvarry. Viking sent me a copy in advance of its January release, thanks Viking.

The first level of this novel I was struck by was the narrative voice Gilvarry lends his lead character Boy Hernandez - it is queeny, misquoting Dostoyevsky one minute and Coco Chanel the next. One could say it is over dramatic, were it not for the overly dramatic circumstances Boy finds himself in. This is a voice ready-made for a one man show in a downtown club.

I would not, could not, nor did I ever raise a hand in anger against America. I love America, the golden bastard. It's where I was born again: propelled through the duct of JFK International, out the rotating doors, push, push, dripping a post-U.S. Customs sweat down my back, and slithering out on my feet to a curb in Queens, breathe. Then into a yellow cab, thrown to the masses. Van Wyck, BQE, Brooklyn Bridge, Soho, West Side Highway, Riverside Drive - these are a few of my favorite things!

My story is one of unrequited love. Love for a country so great that it has me welling up inside knowing it could never love me back. And even after the torment they've put me through - tossing me into this little cell in No Man's Land - would you believe that I still hold American close to my heart? Stupid me, Boy Hernandez. Filipino by birth, fashion designer by trade, and terrorist by association.

I hear an over-earnest Diana Ross sound track playing under that opening voice-over. The other delight of this book is its unlikely hybrid of influences - think Ugly Betty meets...I don't know... Serpico. One the one hand, it is utter camp - it creates a pitch-perfect swish of the superficial, over-the-top fashion world and Boy's desperate ambition to get inside the holy tent in Bryant Park during Fashion Week, leading him to accept the funding of Ahmed Quereshi and the PR support of a man with the unfortunate name of Ben Laden (no really). This eventually links him to a terrorist plot and lands him in Guantanamo Bay prison. On the other hand, From the Memoirs... is an outraged critique of the American government detaining people without charging them or providing them access to legal representation because of fears, legitimate or not, that they are dangerous terrorists. What is clever, as opposed to merely entertaining about Gilvarry's paradoxical cross-breed is the way it skewers the extremity of America's dubious legal practices, sends up the superficiality of the bases of our fears, and points to the absurdity of the way life will go on in any and all circumstances. Though we were supposedly dangerously under siege, this did not curtail lavish spending on runway fashion shows, the publishing of Vogue, or the reopening of Century 21, and don't give me the "that would mean the terrorists were winning" crap, if you want to see countries crippled by terrorism or war there is a long list to choose from.

From the Memoirs of a non-Enemy Combatant has its moments of dumb silliness and the end gets a little long and explanatory, but the prose is swift moving and smart and Gilvarry never breaks character. Its best moments offer some really good laughs and the incongruity of its worlds, the thing that sticks with one after reading it, can produce nuanced political satire. For instance, Boy offers an appreciation of his prison bathing partner, Riad, the man assigned to him as they went in twos for their weekly shower. Here is an educated Islamic man from Birmingham who creates a charity to give away both Islamic and Western literature in poverty stricken Pakistani towns. It is somewhat in question, whether these activities may have crossed over the Afghan border. However, one mullah saw him as a threat to his sovereign rule and so informed on him, eventually landing him in the same prison as Boy. Is Riad virtuous or is Boy gullible? Whether one is a paragon of self-motivated superficiality or intellectuality and self-less philanthropy, says Gilvarry's lampoon, one can be equally suspect in the hunt for enemy combatants and equally unlucky at the hands of America's freely elected and democratic government.

Gilvarry is also an editor at the Tottenville Review a smart on-line book review that I enjoyed checking out.

Seeking freedom on multiple levels (Books - The Free World by David Bezmozgis)

The Free World, David Bezmozgis's novel about the immigration of a Jewish family from Soviet-governed Latvia to the West in the 1970s, has made a few of this year's top ten lists. Although I found much in it to interest me, it isn't quite making mine. The Krasnansky family consists of Alec, his brother Karl, their parents, wives, and Karl's children. They come to Rome - which serves as the purgatory between their old lives (Soviet, Jewish, a world where they have possessed some power, some property, and some sense of themselves) and their new (Italian, Catholic, a world of poverty and uncertainty). Here they wait to find out which country will grant them a visa - their hope of salvation. This novel is about the aspiration to be free in both a political sense and a personal one. Even as Alec and the other characters aspire to escape Soviet economic oppression and anti Semitism, they find they cannot be free of themselves. The abstract realm of this paradox is created smartly and on multiple levels however the tension that sustains a drama, the kind one can feel, remained a distant idea.

Some of my criticism is of the writing itself, which could be excessive and self-conscious.

Alec Krasnansky stood on the platform of Vienna's Western Terminal while, all around him, the representatives of Soviet Jewry - from Tallinn to Tashkent - roiled, snarled, and elbowed to deposit their belongings onto the waiting train. He own family roiled among them...

I don't need everyone to write like Hemmingway, but the squeezing of three less-than-common verbs into the very first sentence, though this could potentially communicate something of the frantic crowdedness of the station platform if I had more context, seemed only to say something about the writer coming so early in the story. I was wary from the get go.

Alec and Karl's stories alternate with letters between Polina and her sister, still in the USSR, and memories of their father Samuil of his early life with his brother Reuven. Although Alec's human frailty is meant to be the glue that holds these stories together, the tension between the spoiled, aimless womanizer he is and the man one wishes he could be so that the aspirations of his family can be realized, is abstract and lacking in pathos until too late in the novel. Samuil's story provides more of the traditional ingredients of drama - namely conflict and emotion - but as his story is not this novel's center, it doesn't root it firmly enough. His memories are dramatically justified, which satisfyingly integrates character and plot. When the government immigration forms ask for details about one's life that could influence a decision about acceptance into the country, this occasions for Samuil a deep examination of his life's choices.

Once he was in the country Josef doubted the Canadians would notice that they'd gained another elderly invalid.

He recommended that Samuil also prepare a contingency plan.

- Contingency plan, Samuil said. What is my contingency plan?
- America, Josef said.
- America, Samuil snorted.
- Well, where else?
- Where else? The other place.
- What other place? Israel?
- The grave.
- I understand your persepctive, Samuil Leyzerovich, Joseph said. But please remember that I speak to you as a friend. It is not too soon to start making preparations. Half an hour. An hour. You fill out some forms, saying you weren't a member of the Party, and that's it.
- My youngest secured himself a job with HIAS. I'm acquainted with these forms.
- So then.
- My hand would turn to stone before I wrote such a thing.
- Yes, I understand, Josef said, it's a problem. But the Americans regard Communists the way the Canadians regard invalids.
- Stone, Samuil said.
- Samuil Leyzerovich, these are not your memoir. In one's memoirs - which are, so to speak, between one's self and one's soul - one must be truthful, but not, I would suspect, on an immigration form that is only between one's self and the American immigration service.

Luckily for us, Samuil cannot make this distinction, as his life's events prove to be some of the more engaging in The Free World. In fact, I found the older generation in this novel - Samuil, his wife Emma, and his friend Josef Roidman - far more moving than their children, possibly because they had a moral center and their choices seemed to motivated by something other than what they could get for themselves. Consequently, I felt their losses, whereas Alec's just seemed to be what he deserved.

The novel is not short on lovely details that are instructive of the specifics of a life as a citizen or a refugee of 1970s USSR. For instance, Polina must write to her sister using an assumed name for her and Bezmozgis writes of the selection of this pseudonym, which was not only a sweet moment, but also exemplified this novel's theme of escaping oneself.

There are also lots of good one liners. For instance, when one destination is eliminated as a possible destination for the Krasnansky family, the agency that facilitates their immigration suggests Canada as another option.

- Now is a good time for Canada. I'd consider it myself but I've been waiting on Australia for so long I already feel Australian, Syomka said.
- Do we have to decide this second? Karl asked.
- No, you can think about it, Syomka said.
- We'll think about it, Karl said.
- You can use the stairwell. It's quiet. I'll come and fetch you in ten minutes, Syomka said, and opened the door that led to the stairwell.

In the stairwell, Karl's sons, sensing the gravity of the situation, hooted once to hear the echo, and then were silenced. Karl remained standing and leaned his back against the door.

- This is how you decide your family's future, ten minutes in a stairwell? Samuil asked.

or

- Wonderful man, Tal. A true genius. Although he is in Karpov's entourage in the Philippines. What can I say, it's hard to be consistent with one's allegiances.
- For some, yes.
- It's certainly been true of me. If I settle on an allegiance it is guaranteed that new and compromising information will emerge. I revere Lenin, I learn he's a German agent. I venerate Stalin, Khrushchev tells me he killed Mandelstam and a few million others. I tell you, if I worshipped the sun, we'd all end up in the dark.

Or, when Alex discusses immigration with his roommate, another Soviet in limbo who has already spent some time in Israel:

What you are looking for doesn't exist, and you're not going to find it.

Taking no offense, Lyova said, That may be so. Then again, I'm not looking for perfection. So far I've been a citizen of two utopias. Now I have modest expectations. Basically, I want the country with the fewest parades.

In The Free World, the supporting cast ends up being more compelling than the lead character and individual episodes more engaging than the narrative arc, which left this reader interested at some times, entertained at others, but only sporadically passionately involved.

See what other blogging readers thought: Reading Matters, Kevin from Canada, The Mookse and Gripes.

A history of volatile Central Europe where the political is the personal (Books - The Ghosts of Europe by Anna Porter)

Anna Porter's The Ghosts of Europe relates the history of a rapidly changing region - Central Europe - that is Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary. She focuses on the twenty years since the 1989 revolution which concluded in the fall of the Soviet empire, but necessarily informs this discussion with a good deal of context, including how these countries and their people were impacted by World War II, as this was so much the making of the region, and sometimes reaching back further to include the influences of the Ottoman or Hapsburg Empires. Though informative, her approach makes no pretense at a broad or objective text bookish approach. Her question is focused and it motivation is personal.

In 2006, I set out to discover whether democracy had taken root behind the Iron Curtain. I chose Central Europe because this part of the world had been the dividing space between East and West, or, as Stalin and Churchill deemed, between spheres of conflicting influence. My second reason is that I am a Central European.

Porter suitably fashions her story out of a series of portraits, telling it through individual lives - apropos for cultures where the political is the personal. They range from an expat Polish cafe owner to the last Communist leader of Poland.

In Stas Pruszynski's smoke-filled Radio Cafe, everyone wants to discuss history. Perhaps they are encouraged by the framed, faded photographs of former Radio Free Europe celebrities that decorate the walls; perhaps it's the Old World atmosphere of the resaurant-bar, the bare wooden tables. Or maybe it's Stas himself (who used to be "Stash" when he lived in Montreal), drawing them deep into his own tales of a childhood irreparably damaged by war... As he talks, Stas leans across the polished mahogany table, his arms folded, his broad shoulders hunched, wishing to share confidences, but his voice carries over the others in the room.
[...]
I visited General Jaruzelski in September 2009. Once he had been among the most feared men in Europe; a general in the second-largest Communist army - second only to the Soviet Union's Red Army; a leader in the Warsaw Pact's invasion of Czechoslovaki ending in Dubcek's experiment of "socialism with a human face." He was Poland's defense minister during the 1967-68 Jewish purges...Once he would have been closely guarded. Now there is one desultory guard and a single blond secretary who confesses that her schedule is not overly busy.

He is tall, spare, erect in his immaculate grey suit. His hair is thinning, his face impassive, and he still wears his trademark dark glasses. They have lost some of their menace since I read that they hid a weakness caused by the intense Siberian light. His hand is outstretched when we meet. There is an Old World formality of an almost hand-kiss, his thin lips brushing my fingers for a fraction of an uncomfortable second...

These excerpts convey not only Porter's skill at creating atmosphere and character, the starting point of her stories, the first one is a particularly apt metaphor for what Porter does so successfully - playing the host amidst images of history and drawing the reader in to share confidences.

That is not to say that Porter's treatment amounts to history-lite. Not at all. She is a keen observer of shifts of power and their political and economic consequences and how they impact the quality of people's lives - particularly those of minority members of these cultures like the Roma and Jewish people. Porter's analysis suggests that the changes are in-progress and their final outcomes far from sealed and delivered.

The sense of unfairness and failed expectations has led to a toxic atmosphere in Central Europe at the end of the first decade of the new century. The 2009 Slovak presidential elections resounded with nationalist, anti-minority voices. In Hungary, anti- government, anti-minorities, anti-Semitic demonstrations grew in number and ferocity. Those who are disappointed with the results of cozying up to the West, of adopting its capitalist credo, are beginning to yearn for the security of the old order. As philosopher-politician Ralf Dahrendorf predicted, when economic conditions deteriorate, "The ancien regime begins to look to many like the good old days."
[...]
Czechoslovakia's interwar president, Tomas Masaryk, famously remarked, "We now have democracy. All we need are some democrats." When asked how long he thought it would take for his country to become a democratic state, he answered, fifty years. That was in 1918. It is now just twenty years since the advent of democracy in Central Europe.

This may seem to be a book on European history and the consequences of Communism, and of course it is. The discussion of the role intellectuals and dissidents play in society, whether the opening of the sealed files of the Secret Police is the ultimate truth-telling it is meant to be - its advantages as well as its costs, and the legacy of anti-Semitism in the countries of Central Europe, were captivatingly told and instructive. However, I also found Porter's book usefully provocative in considering the influences, positive and perilous, of American style consumer-driven Democracy. The Ghosts of Europe is fluidly written, opinionated, and very engaging - an informative read on an influential and still volatile region whose changes have not fully come home to roost.