Rediscovering art in suffering, rediscovering language in silence (Books - The Life of an Unknown Man by Andrei Makine)

Barely a few pages into Andrei Makine's The Life of an Unknown Man (Trans. Geoffrey Strachan, Graywolf Press, 2012), I had a feeling it was going to become a favorite novel of 2012.  It is a literate paean to the life of a simple man, made memorable by his fierce and determined love.  It begins in Paris as Shutov, an emigre Russian writer, mourns a break-up with a much younger woman.  He mouths appreciation for Chekhov that is learned, indeed he speaks on television as a member of literary panel of experts, yet in his appraisal he is distant, formulaic, and, as one ambitious for a different kind of success, he is soured by fear of his own mediocrity. He is a man caught in between - in between old age and youth, in between success and ordinariness, in between the refined, educated life of a Frenchman-of-letters and a victim of the Soviet repression of anything humanistic or beautiful.

I'm not Russian, Lea.  I'm Soviet.  So you see I'm filthy, stupid, and vicious.  Very different from all those Michel Strogoffs and Prince Myshkins the French are crazy about.

Bookeywookey's best fiction reads of 2012

And now, my favorite fiction reads of the year (excluding re-reads which are obviously already favorites).

Toby's Room by Pat Barker
The Patrick Melrose Novels by Edward St Aubyn
Any Human Heart by William Boyd
What is the What by Dave Eggers
The Stranger's Child by Alan Hollinghurst
Be Near Me by Andrew O'Hagan
Nineteen-Seventy-Four by David Peace
The Life of an Unknown Man by Andrei Makine

I enjoyed looking over all the fiction I read this year.  The worlds I inhabited thanks to the authors were so varied, full of strong characters, sharp observations, and the narrative technique, particularly in this short list, was sure.  I'm not sure whether I am going to end up wanting to add Andrei Makine's The Life of an Unknown Man to the list of contenders (addendum: see above) , as I'm in the middle of it now, but here are the four, upon looking back, that I think the best of the best. Click the titles for links to my posts about them.

Bookeywookey's best biography and memoir reading of 2012

There is a blizzard headed our way here in the wilds of Ohio and I brought no boots.  Great!  I guess I will return to my end-of-year list-making. 

I noticed that I returned to a reading pleasure of old this year.  I used to read many more biographies and autobiographies than I have in the past few years (especially when I was acting), but in 2012 I read many more. Here were the highlights.

Catherine the Great by Robert Massie
Blue Nights by Joan Didion
A Positively Final Appearance by Alec Guinness
My Name Escapes Me by Alec Guinness
Winter Journal by Paul Auster

It is difficult to pick a 'best' from this list since the straight, long-form biography of the empress of Russia is so different from the memoir form, which is different again from Joan Didion's deep elegiac reflection on the loss of her daughter.  Good thing I don't have to choose.  These were all great, but I'll single out:

Bookeywookey's best non-fiction (non-biographical) read of 2012

Time for the annual best-of ritual.  I'm dividing my non-fiction category into life story forms (biography, memoir) and anything else.  Here were the non-biographical non-fiction highlights of my 2012 reading:


The Emperor of all Maladies by  Siddhartha Mukherjee 
Remarkable Creatures by Sean B. Carroll
The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander
Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo
In Europe by Geert Mak


There isn't a single title in this list that I wouldn't strongly recommend.  Since The Emperor of all Maladies and Behind the Beautiful Forevers got a lot of air time from others, I think I'll call it a tie between In Europe and Remarkable Creatures.  I found In Europe impressive for combining tremendous scope - covering all of Europe and the 20th Century - with a sense of the impact of history on individual human beings.  Remarkable Creatures makes an adventure story out of a narrative that shows how science done by individual mavericks contributes to the fund of general knowledge.

2012 reading roundup - let's do the numbers

I feel a little behind in my accounting.  I always enjoy my annual review of where my reading tastes took me over the year.  So, let's see what kind of reading year I had in 2012.

I have completed 60 books to date, writing about 58 of them.  I have a few more in-progress and am likely to finish 1 or 2.  Genre categories are not mutually exclusive.  If a book falls into more than 1 category, I list it in both.

Books read: 60
written by men: 44
written by women: 16
in translation: 5
re-read: 2
published in the past year or so: 19
fiction: 31
non-fiction: 28
on the fence: 1
poetry: 1
biography/autobiography/memoir: 9
history/political affairs/social science:  9
science: 9

I'm a little surprised I got through so much, but I'm conscious as I'm beginning to write my dissertation, that next year's numbers are likely to be a lot more modest.  Not that I won't be reading, it will be many more science articles next year and many fewer books. Or at least, that's what I expect.

Next up: my best-of lists for 2012.

Happy holidays everyone.

English innocence in Weimar Germany (Books - The Temple by Stephen Spender)

Oxford poets, Weimar Germany, you'd think that I would have enjoyed Stephen Spender's The Temple a little more.  Spender wrote it in 1929-1930 at the age of 21, so it has all of the enthusiasm of that tender age.  It was never published, I suppose, because it would have outed a few too many of his acquaintances and he feared action for libel.  Spender rewrote it in 1986, updating it with clunky self-conscious awareness of the impending war that deprives the narrator of what I suspect was too embarrassing a show of political naivete.  To my reading, this stripped what is already a work of patent juvenilia of most of its charm.  What remains pscyhologically astute and historically interesting is the certainty of the young characters that Germany was in a revolutionary time of enlightened openness, that there would never be another war, and among the most educated of the characters, many of whom were Jewish or homosexual, a conspicuous blindness to the threat of the rising Nazi party.  That observation and a good deal of decent descriptive writing kept me going. 

An unforgiving island and a story woven to pass the time (Books - San Miguel by T.C. Boyle)

San Miguel was the first novel I have read of the 13 of T. C. Boyle and I found him a vivid writer who really knows how to tell a good story.  This tale of three generations from the 1880s to the 1940s who inhabit an unforgiving island off the coast of Southern California was free of Boyle's reputed whimsy.  I was going to say that this is a sober tale about the borderline between grit and stubbornness, and it is sober, but unlike many modern novels that put forth a unifying theme, this is a novel that is about what it is about.  The damp, ramshackle ranch where the Waters and then the Lester families live is not a symbol, it's a dwelling.

Her first impression was of nakedness, naked walls struck with penurious little windows, a yard of windblown sand giving onto an infinite vista of sheep-ravaged scrub that radiated out from it in every direction and not a tree or shrub or scap of ivy in sight.  There was nothing even remotely quaint or cozy about it.  It might as well have been lifted up in a tornado and set down in the middle of the Arabian Desert.  And where were the camels?  The women in burnooses?  She was so disappointed - stunned, shocked - that she was scarcely aware of the boy as he pushed open the rude gate for her.  "You want I should put the things in the parlor?"  he asked.

The characters did not, as the book's jacket suggest, read like examples of strength, they are simply people, very flawed people who could be petty, who could give up, who could be jealous, overly ambitious, loving, and, yes, determined. The advantage of this was that they were unpredictable.  I felt like I was spying on these people in their lives, that if they turned around and saw me they would feel interrupted and self-conscious.  Without a theme to give the reading a unifying purpose, the job of Boyle's narrative was to keep me interested in the place and the characters and it is his talent that he does.  This felt like old fashioned storytelling - not a narrative to sell an idea but a story woven to pass the time, to entertain, to hold the reader's interest.

Voluptuary and statesman (Books - Catherine the Great by Robert K. Massie)

Literature, theatre, and neuroscience are the fascinations I profess in the tagline to this blog, but while my enthusiasm for fiction and science are evident in my reading choices, and my interest in how narratives build selves shows up again and again in my writing, I think of my interest in Central and Eastern European history as a kind of secret pleasure - one I share with my dear friend Sheila (although I haven't read nearly the amount she has on the subject).  We met for an evening of red wine and talk this past week and she saw Robert Massie's Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman (625 pages. Random House, 2011 ) poking its massive head out of my briefcase and laughed knowingly.  Many a time is it that we have met over the last twenty years when the second to arrive finds the first at the bar, red wine already in-progress, nose buried in a 900 page tome about the purges of Stalin, or the velvet revolution.  In any event, the truth now out on the table, I can confess to not merely enjoying Massie's biography of Catherine II, and learning a ton about 18th century European history - not just of Russia but also Poland and Austria-Hungary, and he does a great one-chapter mini-review of the French Revolution - but also to having done some much-needed work on my biceps, triceps, and lats, lugging the 4 lbs of its heft back and forth to work every day.

World War I and the changing roles of women and men (Books - Toby's Room by Pat Barker)

World War I was one of the most influential events of the last century.  Some credit it with ushering in the modern war, the machine age, the birth of the airplane for regular human use, modern music, the spread of modern clinical psychology, and the death of chivalry.  Certainly it heralded the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, German, and Russian monarchies. Killed 8-9 million soldiers, disabled 7 million, and seriously injured 15 million. Germany lost 15% of its adult males, Austria–Hungary 17%, and France 10%.  Another several million civilians starved to death in its wake.  It is little wonder that artists have spent so much time contemplating its devastating reach.  English novelist Pat Barker has made the subject of World War I her literary bread and butter.  Her Regeneration Trilogy fictionalized Siegfried Sassoon's treatment for shell-shock after serving in World War I.  It dramatizes socio-political as well as clinical-scientific complexities of the war experience in a way that makes you feel as thought you were present then.  It's a strong and memorable read.  Her Life Class looked at making art in the context of war and the changes experienced by one young English woman as a consequence.  Pat Barker's latest, Toby's Room, like Life Class, deals with a young painting student named Elinor and her contemporaries, Neville and Paul.  I found it a richer exploration than her last novel of the changes wrought on the younger generation in the wake of the war.

Justice does not banish loss (Books - Berlin Cantata by Jeffrey Lewis)

Berlin, a mecca of culture and progressive thought in the 1920s, cleared of much of its talent by the Nazis,then destroyed like most German cities by the war, then divided as a spoil of war, half-Communist half-Western, then - 1989 - the wall falls. In this city: a house owned by a Jewish family, then Nazis, then Communists.  To that city on the verge of change comes an American woman, the next generation of the Jewish owners of the house.  Germany's efforts to make reparations to those they harmed in the war mean that she might be able to lay claim to the house.  In Berlin Cantata (Haus, 2012), Jeffrey Lewis tells the story of modern Berlin - a city where the layers of history are exposed, where the past walks on two feet, seemingly as alive as the present.  A city of ghosts.  Lewis tells this story of memory, guilt, politics, and family as a melange of solo voices.  The house's former owners, its current residents, the young woman's lawyer, a contemporary journalist speak their monologues as the story accumulates and the mysteries of the past unfold.

Are the reports of the death of publishing greatly exaggerated?

Books are dying, the print medium is dead, goes the hysterical rumor, and it's Amazon that is killing them.  Well, they are alive and well here.  On the Media did an excellent show on this subject in April and re-broadcast this weekend.

How did J.K. Rowling stand up to Amazon?

Russian e-pirating of books - it creates free loaders, but it also widens an author's readership and may ultimately boost legal sales.

Listen to the podcast here:

Publishing: Adapt or Die - On The Media

It's their usual deep level of reporting - critical, with a somewhat bemused tone. 

Humane political thought as it arises from facing the conflict in ourselves (Books - Isaiah Berlin: A Life by Michael Ignatieff)

I had felt enough of the influence of Isaiah Berlin on contemporary political thinkers and writers who I like to read, that I wanted to know who he was.  For this, I turned to Michael Ignatieff's affectionate biography Isaiah Berlin: A Life (Vintage 2000).  Born in Latvia in the early 1900s, living briefly in Russia, and an eventually taking refuge in England, he became more English than the English, rising through the ranks of academia to the level of Oxford don.  He was an intellectual with a powerful gift for talking about ideas. His mature thought brought together history, philosophy, and psychology to consider contemporary politics with complexity and compassion.  He served as a valued advisor to Churchill and John F. Kennedy.

The limits of genius (Books - Measuring the World by Daniel Kehlmann)

Daniel Kehlmann is a popular German-born writer living in Austria.  With Measuring the World (Quercus, 2007) he has taken the biographies of mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss and scientist Alexander von Humbolt as the jumping off point for a novel which vividly and amusingly imagines their inner lives.  Contemporaneous to the late 18th to early 19th centuries, Gauss and Humboldt were endowed with brilliant minds which saw novel ways to answer questions (and defeat strongly held but untested assumptions) about the world in which we live.  Both took on the entire world as their subject - the height of its peaks, the composition and temperature of its core, the shape of planetary orbits, the path of the ocean's currents, the very shape of space - but their methods of measurement couldn't have been more different.  While Humboldt shocked his own spine in testing the nervous system's ability to conduct electricity and travelled to the far reaches of the world at considerable risk to himself - he couldn't pass an Andean peak without climbing it or a mine shaft without dropping himself in - Gauss preferred to make his measurements without leaving his armchair.

The riches and burdens of family legacy (Books - The Scientists by Marco Roth)

Our part of New York City was relatively spared from serious Hurricane effects.  Our electricity stayed on, we had some downed trees, the stores were emptied of bread, and transportation to work was difficult, but being at the highest elevation in Manhattan, we didn't have much flooding.  Thank you to all the friends who checked up on us.  I thought the two days off from work would give me time to read and catch up on a considerable backlog of book posts, but that fantasy was never realized. I was back at work on Wednesday, where a much depleted staff carried on with the Halloween party we had offered to host for the families served by the Children's Evaluation and Rehabilitation Center where I work.  To our surprise, we had over 100 kids show up in costume.  Boy were they and their parents glad to get out of the house!

Another New York story was the subject of The Scientists by Marco Roth (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012) which I was convinced was a novel, but turns out to have been a memoir.  It tells of a thirty-something New Yorker whose father, a medical researcher, contracted the HIV virus in the 1980s. 

Growing up minus the childhood (Books - Down the Rabbit Hole by Juan Pablo Villalobos)

Tochtli is a precocious seven-year-old, although he protests otherwise, who lives in a palace with its own zoo and is obsessed with hats, difficult words, and Liberian pygmy hippopotami.

Some people say I'm precocious.  They say it mainly because they think I know difficult words for a little boy.  Some of the difficult words I know are: sordid, disastrous, immaculate, pathetic, and devastating.  There aren't really that many people who say I'm precocious.  The problem is I don't know that many people.  I know maybe thirteen or fourteen people, and four of them say I'm precocious.  They say I look older.  Or the other way around: that I'm too little to know words like that.  Or back-to-front and the other way around, sometimes people think I'm a dwarf.  But I don't think I'm precocious.  What happens is I have a trick, like magicians who pull rabbits out of hats, except I pull words out of the dictionary.  Every night before I go to sleep I read the dictionary.  My memory, which is really good, practically devastating, does the rest...

Being rich ain't all its cracked up to be (Books - The Patrick Melrose Novels by Edward St. Aubyn)

Alcohol addiction,heroin addiction, incest, your father's public humiliation of your mother - seems a small price to pay for unconscionable wealth and a villa in Provence, no?  Patrick Melrose grows up with a seemingly unreasonable share of horror on the one hand and neglect on the other, which lead to a sense of aimlessness, some very persistent chemical dependencies, and an extraordinary amount of self-disgust.  Thank goodness Melrose becomes reflective enough so that this account of his first 45-or-so years is more than a parade of ghoulish abuse.  Indeed, Edward St. Aubyn's Patrick Melrose novels: Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, Mother's Milk, (The Patrick Melrose Novels, Picador, 2012) and At Last (Farrar, Straus and Grioux, 2011) are mercilessly observant of a world of advantage and indulgence, while at the same time being brutally funny. Their narrative arc traces the legacy of cruelty and narcissism that first mangles and imprisons the mind of its protagonist and eventually liberates it over nearly 900 pages that read like wild-fire consuming the lavish homes of Southern California millionaires, only here, most of the residents seem unwilling to leave their burning homes.  The events were sometimes so dreadful that I had to remember to close my mouth, which hung agape.  So precise was the scrutiny St. Aubyn gave his characters, it was like looking at a collection of extraordinarily insects, still alive, pinned inside a luxurious display case.  But the cruelty is ultimately redeemed by a vision that is humane, even forgiving, but never pacifying. Having read the first four novels collected in a single volume, as I reached the last word of Mother's Milk, I said aloud 'Oh my god,' and went out the next day to buy At Last, which had recently been published separately.

The public voice of our frailty (Books - Blue Nights by Joan Didion)

If you read Joan Didion's A Year of Magical Thinking, in which Didion, through writing, relentlessly observes herself in the act of grieving her husband during the year following his sudden death from a heart attack, I imagine you have read, or are thinking about reading, Blue Nights.  Blue Nights, although it is an act of mourning her daughter Quintana, who died scarcely a year after her father, is not just more of the same.  A Year of Magical Thinking was written through the raging storm.  The book is brutal.  Didion is dogged in examining her replacement of ordered thought with irrational and yet sensible struggles to undo the death of her husband - John Gregory Dunne - via special deals she makes with the universe.  In it, she calls less on their life prior to his death, instead replaying the evening of his death over and over.  In Blue Nights, Didion has allowed more time to pass since her daughter's death before writing. Here there is less the feeling of a disaster film shot from the cockpit of a crashing plane, and more the feeling of an invocation.  They are both books of mourning, but in Blue Nights Didion calls on memory to wonder at the life and death of her daughter, to actively feel the pain of two losses - one of Quintana, the other of herself - and to assuage them.  She uses repetition of form not exactly to reign in the emotion, but to structure it, so that the book is a conscious act of creation rather than simply an outpouring of raw grief.  I thought its form evocative of a sestina which, Mary Kinzie's A Poet's Guide to Poetry tells us, is a formal verse structure with 39 lines containing 6 stanzas of six lines whose end words repeat verbatim in the following stanzas in a highly prescribed fashion.  The seventh stanza uses all six end-words, also in a specific way. The repetition creates recurrent sounds, allowing a particular theme to echo as a refrain (as grief does with repeated memories).  The highly stereotyped order, when used well and pitted against complex emotions, creates esthetic tension and that is precisely how it functioned in Blue Nights.

Piteable men building their positions of strength on the backs of formidable women (Books - Three Strong Women by Marie NDiaye)

Three Strong Women by Marie NDiaye (Alfred A. Knopf, 2012), has received some strong press and the prestigious Prix Goncourt.  The author's literary prowess won her a publisher for her first novel at age 18.  Fernanda Eberstadt's fine review of this book in The New York Times Book Review informs us:

The expectation — whether menacing or well meaning — that NDiaye should “represent” multiracial France, or be considered a voice of the French African diaspora, has often dogged her. In fact, as NDiaye is at pains to make clear, she scarcely knew her Senegalese father, who came to France as a student in the 1960s and returned to Africa when she was a baby. Raised by her French mother — a secondary school science teacher — in a housing project in suburban Paris, with vacations in the countryside where her maternal grandparents were farmers, NDiaye describes herself as a purely French product, with no claim to biculturalism but her surname and the color of her skin. Nonetheless, the absent father — charismatic, casually cruel, voraciously selfish — haunts NDiaye’s fiction and drama, as does the shadow of a dreamlike Africa in which demons and evil portents abound, where the unscrupulous can make overnight fortunes and, with another turn of the wheel, find themselves rotting in a jail cell. 

Re-imagining Shakespeare's fairy kings and foolish mortals (Books - The Great Night by Chris Adrian)

It was Sam Ruddock's review that led me to Chris Adrian's The Great Night, an unrestrained hooplah of a novel that re-imagines Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, placing it in Buena Vista Park in contemporary San Francisco.  It's quite a ride.  Adrian is not only a well-regarded writer, he is also a fellow in pediatric hematology-oncology, which leads me to assume he has probably seen his share of painful loss and human suffering.  Interesting then that his characters Henry, Will, and Molly - the equivalent of the quartet of mortal young lovers in Shakespeare's play - have not only deeply suffered, but their lives are irrevocably driven by their suffering.  One could say they are completely lost in it as they are lost in the park.  The royal fairy couple, Tatiana and Oberon, are not broken up over a changeling in this take, they are grieving their child's death from leukemia.  The rude mechanicals of Shakespeare are translated to a group of homeless people rehearsing not the myth of Pyramus and  Thisbe but a politically-driven musical based on the film Soylent Green, no really.  Puck is still a big trouble-maker.  It is the unleashing of his power in the service of Tatiana and Oberon's unmitigated grief that drives the tangled, hallucinatory drama of healing that comprises the action of this novel.

The story of the 20th century as the search for a 'self' (Books - Any Human Heart by William Boyd)

It seems that my vacation reading brought an unintentional spate of novels built on the autobiographical form.  In most ways, What is the What could not be more different than William Boyd's Any Human Heart but they both involve relating the events of a life from a subjective point of view.  Any Human Heart (a recommendation of Danielle's - another good one - thanks!) is the picture of a century.  The 20th century, to be exact, but it is told through the journals of one Logan Gonzago Mountstuart, a British subject born in Uruguay and sometime resident of England, America, Nigeria, and France.