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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
Two qualities are evident in Michael Ondaatje's The Cat's Table right at the outset. The book involves the memory of a writer named Michael, originally from Sri Lanka, who at age 11 travels without a guardian on a ship across the Indian Ocean, Suez Canal, and the Mediterranean to reach his mother in England, where he will start a new life. On that ship he spends his time with two other boys - Ramadhin and Cassius. The first quality of the story is an instantly elegiac nostalgia, a wistful tone that says - I was never as innocent and happy as I was then.
I learned of German, Weimar-era novelist Irmgard Keun from a post by Bookslut about a New York literary event on the subject of her life and work, as I mentioned here. My friend and I each bought a book and I got The Artificial Silk Girl which, we learned, is a staple of a contemporary German High School education. Thanks to Caroline and Lizzy's German Literature Month, I actually read it in a timely fashion and in the context of lots of other discerning readers tackling German authors. Check out GLM's pages, they're chock full of links.
Given the recent developments in the Occupy Wall Street movement, Michael Kazin's book American Dreamers is a timely one. It recounts the history of the influence that radical, leftist movements have had upon United States history. He allows that the very definition of the left has been historically muddied, as both Barack Obama and Noam Chomsky, who hold polarized views on many aspects of U.S. policy, would be said to be on it. Kazin's definition:
Lucy Caldwell is an Irish novelist (Where They Were Missed, The Meeting Point) and playwright (Carnival, The Luthier, Guardians, Leaves, Notes to Future Self) whose work has been roundly praised in the English press but, I must admit, was unknown to me. Her The Meeting Point has won the University of Wales Dylan Thomas Prize, a prestigious and generous award for young writers given out 
At a recent party of a friend I will call Radio Woman, the Ragazzo and I met two wonderful writers - Ellen Kushner and Delia Sherman. Delia and I got talking about fantasy fiction, her genre, and whose books we like and I found myself less than enthusiastic about a certain author she admired. What do you like, she asked me? I like dark works with language that can be either inventive or very straightforward but has a sophistication, and, especially if they're written for younger readers, I like writing that assumes those readers to be smart and resilient. I also generally like, if magic is a part of the story, that its use be integral and expressive about something in the world that we come from, not just a fantasy literary device used out of habit because other successful writers in the genre use it. Well then, she said, I think you will love Margo Lanagan. She was right.
The Middle East may at times seem a small and distant part of the world, but with a land area only slightly smaller than the U.S., a population of more than 200 million people, possessing 40% of the world's oil, and the birthplace of three of the world's major religions, its influence upon world politics is not to be underestimated. Yet, today's map of the Middle East did not come into being until recently. The contemporary borders and the names of the countries Jordan, Lebanon, Iran, and Israel were all created in the 20th Century. Imperialist England and France, as well as Russia were highly influential in drawing this map to suit their strategic needs. Jonathan Schneer's 2010 book The Balfour Declaration contends that this 1917 document, a promise to by the British Cabinet to establish a Jewish homeland in the Middle East, was really a means of manipulating Arab nationalists, the Ottoman Empire (which was allied to Germany), and the world's
This is the second book I have read in as many weeks in which the writing was a sheer act of will, the other being Joan Didion's A Year of Magical Thinking. The esteemed historian Tony Judt wrote the essays that became The Memory Chateau by dictating them, having become quadrapeligic due to ALS, a degenerative disease of the motor neurons that eventually killed him in 2010. What impressed me nearly as much as his perseverance while looking death squarely in the face was the fact that the form he chose was a new kind of writing for him - memoir. Given that the form of one's writing becomes a signature of our work and could be said to be integrated with our very sense of self, I thought a change in form a courageous leap so late in the game. Although one could say, that the starkly new circumstances of his disease and the mental state accompanying it necessitated such a shift. In any event, it was a highly successful one.
Jane Gardam's post-World War II coming of age story, The Flight of the Maidens, features three very different young women who share the honor of prestigious university scholarships as they graduate from a small Yorkshire high school. The time is 1946. Hetty tries to extricate herself from what we would nowadays call a co-dependent relationship with her mother, alternating between childish reliance and virulent rebellion. Una dates a "bad boy" as she is raised by a single mother who keeps a beauty salon. Liselotte is a German Jewish refugee, taken in by Quakers when she arrives via the Kindertransport.
As it happens I am in Death Valley, in a room at the Enterprise Motel and Trailer Park, and it is July, and it is hot. In fact it is 119o. I cannot seem to make the air conditioner work, but
Bernard MacLaverty's Cal - 150 pages that are as densely packed with passion and tension as any I've read in Dostoyevsky or Hardy. The 19-year-old title character lives in Northern Ireland. A Roman Catholic, he is hounded and physically attacked by the Protestant Orangemen. His friends have joined the IRA in response to the violence with which they are threatened. Cal finds the violence too much for him. The struggles of nations would not be important if they didn't effect the lives of individual people. This book is about the converging of conflicts political and personal - the political and religious struggles of an oppressed people, a first great passionate love, and the dilemmas of a sensitive and thoughtful teenager as he makes the moral choices that are going to shape his whole life. I felt deeply the greatness of these struggles as I read. Read my full rave here.
This book has everything - love, suspense, moral conflict, social criticism, psychological acuity, and crack writing. It is pitch-perfect on the a fast-paced, ostentatious, brutal beauty of Rome. Lambert's writing is rich with observations both interior and exterior that imbue character and place with clarity and instantaneous complexity. This novel, though entertaining to read, is an unambiguous critique of the moral hypocrisy that infects the powerful and the nature of crime which combines an abuse of power with the dehumanization of innocent people. Read my full rave here.
Molly Fox is a celebrated actress - a woman who delves deep into what makes up a 'self.' It is her profession to create characters from that knowledge through the medium of her self. Yet, when it comes to letting others truly know her, she does not. 'Can we ever know another?', this novel asks. The Irish novelist Deirdre Madden fashions a deep and beautiful book on this potentially abstract musing that is redolent with the pain of the distance we have from all others - even those we love most - and simultaneously rich with the rewards of the communion we can make through long acquaintance. She is particularly good at using the processes of the actor and writer to reflect on the ways we can inhabit the inherent contradiction of knowing another, but the mechanisms are so integrated with the events of this narrative that it is difficult to reveal them without ruining your reading of this book. This book is a powerful work of art with an undisturbable sense of wholeness. Read my full rave here.
The struggle to keep the champagne bubbling when it's gone flat is the action filling Evelyn Waugh's 1930 satire Vile Bodies. Stephen Fry's brilliant film adaptation, Bright Young Things released in 2003 captures the feel of a breathless, manic party. Jim Broadbent, Stockard Channing, Peter O'Toole, Simon Callow, Stephen Campbell Moore, Emily Mortimer, James Mcavoy, Imelda Stuanton, and Fenella Woolgar are some of the beautifully cast actors who maintain an understated hysteria, if you can imagine understated hysteria. The love that director and cast have for these characters is what impresses me the most. It would be so easy to show us how vile these people are - how silly, how louche, how fey - but instead they love them to death. Raveworthy. Read my full rave here.
Tell Me Everything by Sarah Salway . I opened this book last night and didn't stop reading it until I had finished it. The nearest voice I can think to compare Sarah Salway's to is Lorrie Moore's, and coming from me that is a big compliment. In it Molly experiences a few breaches of trust as a young woman that leave her seriously wounded. She closes down and protects herself by eating. When we meet her she has become one of life's castaways, seriously overweight without a job, a home, or any sense of herself. She meets five people - Mr. Roberts who gives her a job, Mrs. Roberts, Tim - a man of mystery, Liz - a librarian who recommends French authors, and Miranda, a hairdresser. With these relationships she begins to reclaim herself. The story is full of perfectly wrought descriptions, complex observations of human pain and fantasy, and cogent storytelling. Read my full rave here.
