The Raw Man, by George Makana Clark

9780224090469
Jonathan Cape, 2011
323 pp

"Stories want to circle back on themselves."

And in George Makana Clark's The Raw Man, that's exactly what happens.  Told in a reverse-chonological structure, The Raw Man captures not only the main character's family history, but it reveals bits and pieces of  Rhodesia's (now Zimbabwe's) turbulent history during the twentieth century as well.  It is a lovely book about the power of  storytelling, one which begs for reader participation:  the more you learn about the past, the more you want to revisit and re-engage with the present.    It is also a story about the power of blood and identity, one you won't soon forget after having finished the book.

The prologue of the novel, "The Owner of the Story," introduces the reader to house of the narrator, which is actually a metaphor for the novel itself.  It has twelve interior doors, which in passing through them, "you'll find yourself back where you began," a very appropriate beginning for a novel which travels back through different periods of time and links back to the present.  The house is inhabited by the story ghost of Sergeant Gordon, and conjures the smell of peaberry coffee, a lullaby, a garden ... all bits and pieces of Sgt. Gordon's story the house's owner learned from him in years of captivity together as prisoners of war.   As the narrator notes, " I built my house from borrowed memory, every detail as it was described by Gordon long ago in the complete darkness, three miles beneath the earth. "  The story ghost breathes life into Gordon's memories, so that they take form and come alive in the telling.  From the present, the story first skips back to October, 1978, going backward through Gordon's life, revealing scenes of  a very troubled Rhodesia from the 60s through 1980,  and takes a brief foray into the Africa of the 1850s.

The book is not an easy read in terms of subject matter -- the very first story is how Gordon, in the Rhodesian Army,  came to be captured and sent to the hellish copper mines as a prisoner, where on the first day in captivity he witnesses a dead prisoner being roasted on a spit.   But it is there that Gordon tells his stories, where his "life emerged from the darkness as a mosaic of disjointed details...," where his stories were committed to memory by the other prisoners, whose own stories had been lost after years of living in the mine.  His are tales of death,  fear and cruelty in a time of war, mistreatment of "lesser" people by outside colonial powers who've also marginalized and displaced whole societies,  and a family secret that at one point causes a father to hold a pillow over his newborn baby daughter's face. All of these short stories and more creep into the mix before the bigger picture is revealed, not just of Gordon himself, but of his troubled family and of other lives caught up in a very turbulent time in Africa's history.

As each piece of the story is told in a chapter of its own, it slowly begins to dawn on you that in some cultures, this is how history is passed on --  through memories and stories  handed down through the ages, an effort which  helps maintain the ongoing power of tradition and cultural identity that together  have the power to speak to a person's blood.  Sadly, as it also happens,these traditions can also be lost --  here, in the face of wars, cultural displacement and other factors tearing Rhodesia apart,  it  turns out, as one character notes,  that "we have lost our place in the world, and our stories mean nothing now," which is really not true if you think about it ... they just need someone to do the telling and someone to do the listening.

There is something very different going on here in terms of storytelling, and it works well.  In novels with a normal chronological and linear approach, the reader gets an idea that something's going to happen and the time spent reading is to get to whatever that thing might be.  In that sense, the reader is drawn along with the characters and the action of the novel toward an ending.  Here, going backwards, the reader knows that something has happened in the past that takes him or her  to the situation of the present, but it's not exactly clear what that might have been.   Each chapter takes the reader closer to Gordon's roots,  to uncovering his real identity, so that we don't get the full picture of who exactly Gordon is until everything has been exposed, taking us to a beginning.    In the meantime, as each segment of Gordon's life is revealed, there's this compelling urge to revisit the previous section to link things together.  While there's definitely a choppy, rather disconcerting feel to this method,  it works, definitely demanding active, rather than passive reading. It also  leaves  you a bit disoriented as  you're reading one section, wondering "how did we get here?"  and you feel you must  continue reading to find out.  This approach may not be to everyone's taste or liking, but it makes for a more intense and active reading experience.

The Raw Man is a lovely book, one that verges into the realms of the fantastical at times, but at the same time maintains a very realistic  feel as the author goes back through time, connecting disjointed memories into a more cohesive whole. What may be most problematic about this novel is that if you are unfamiliar with the history of the ongoing conflicts in Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), it may be confusing trying to sort out who is on what side, or who are the good guys or the bad guys, or why one side is doing what they do, etc.  I wouldn't let that be a deal breaker if you're considering reading this book, but it can get a bit confusing sometimes.  I loved this book, and recommend it most highly.

*Hard Rain Falling, by Don Carpenter

9781590173244

NYRB Classics, 2009

308 pp.

originally published 1966

A tough novel to categorize, Hard Rain Falling isn’t going to do it for you if you need a book that offers warm fuzzies and a happy, feel-good ending. It is dark, gritty and real, a no-holds barred kind of novel that goes well beyond the much overdone “angry young man” trope to become a story that is intrepidly honest.  Considering its initial publication date of 1966, it’s also a novel much ahead of its time in the way that the author deals with racism, homosexuality and the harshness of unreasoned authority.

The main character is Jack Levitt, whose parents were young and stupid when he was born, leaving him in a hellhole of an orphanage. Jack runs away from there when he is older, lands in Portland, Oregon. 


There he meets Billy Lancing, a young black man from Seattle who gets by as a pool hustler, and with whom Jack finds friendship. But Jack can't stay out of trouble, and eventually lands in a reform school, where he spent much of his time in a dark cell in solitary confinement after nearly killing one of the guards. There 

"At times, all his senses deserted him, and he could not feel the coldness of the concrete or smell his excrement, and the small sounds he made and the sounds that filtered in through the door gradually dimmed, and he was left alone inside his mind, without a past to envision, since his inner vision was gone, too, and without a future to dream, because there was nothing but this emptiness and himself. It was not uncomfortable, not comfortable. These things this did not exist. It was colorless, senseless, mindless, and he sometimes just disappeared into it." (81)

This feeling of utter isolation pervades Jack Levitt's character throughout the novel. Eventually Jack finds himself in San Quentin on a trumped-up charge. It is there he meets up again with Billy Lancing, who maneuvers things so that he and Levitt become cell mates, and what starts out as just prison sex turns into something else, a human and feeling connection between the two, although Jack can't bring himself to admit it until it's too late and Jack is once more in the depths of loneliness.  And even though Jack is eventually somewhat transformed after his release, when he marries and has a kid, the freedom he envisioned in the past continues to escape him.

Hard Rain Falling is a book that is raw in emotion. Every character is real and feels.  This in itself is an incredible achievement - I can't think of another book in which the characters are so powerfully alive, especially Jack. And while so many novelists are into the game of blaming society for an individual's lifelong ills, that's really not the case here. As George Pelecanos notes in the introduction to this story, "the damage done to Jack at his very core can never truly be healed (xi)," and Jack notes that underneath it all, it wasn't really society that had abandoned him, but his parents.

Truly an amazing novel that I can recommend wholeheartedly.

Tell-All, by Chuck Palahniuk

9780385526357  

Doubleday

May 4, 2010


My thanks to the Amazon Vine Program for sending this book.  I am a huge and long-term fan of Palahniuk's books so I was eager to get into this one.  Although a bit slow at the beginning, it turned out to be an awesome satire well worth sticking around for.  One of the biggest criticisms I've read about this book is that this is not the same Palahniuk who wrote Fight Club (which is one of the best books I've ever read, quite frankly), but I tend to get a bit tired of hearing this sort of thing. People blasted Ian McEwan's Solar because it wasn't the same McEwan that wrote Atonement or Saturday -- but come on. Why aren't our favorite authors allowed to do something different once in a while?  Is that such a bad thing? If I were an author I'd be bored staying within the confines of the same mold of every book I'd previously written and I would want to be different once in a while.

(note: page numbers are from the galley copy, not the finished work)

 Without going too much into plot details, Tell-All is a sendup of  that genre of book which according to Palahniuk, Walter Winchell called the "bile-ography," and especially of those who write them -- the "literary equivalent of a magpie, stealing the brightest and darkest moments from every celebrity..." (33).   I give you the Kitty Kellys of the world who latch on to the seedy details of a person's life hoping to sell millions of copies based on reader titillation, or  the Christina Crawfords who publish their hard-life stories that deface the public image of their celebrity parents, showcasing "flaws and faults" to hopefully launch their own careers (83), which Hedda Hopper (the famous gossip columnist), according to the author, would call a "lie-ography." (96) But it's not just biographies in the spotlight here. The book is also a satire on those who get caught up in celebrity worship and gratuitous name-dropping, and on the celebrities themselves for whom life imitates art.  The famous people whose names are highlighted in bold print in Tell-All may be unfamiliar to modern readers, because the book is set in Hollywood's heyday, but substitute any modern celeb name and it's all the same. Nothing much has changed, down to celebrity adoption of less fortunate babies. 

--intermission and illustration--
Personal anecdotes:

a)a few years back, my husband was flying from FL to CA and heard a conversation between two men sitting in the two seats ahead of him. One man was going on about how he was an exec at a record company in Los Angeles, and asked the other what he did. The second guy said "I work for Will." He went on to tell him that he'd just talked to Will that morning, and yada yada yada Will this, Will that. As the conversation progressed, "Will" turned out to be Will Smith, and it turns out that the guy was the principal of Will's kids' school.

b) there was a secretary at a school where I once taught in Los Angeles whose claim to fame was that she used to be  in "the business" (like big deal, everyone in LA is either in the business or wants to be).  Every day she'd tell whoever would listen about how she rubbed shoulders with the likes of Beyonce, and other popular singers.  On and on and on, each day someone else's name would drop from her lips, holding her co-workers enthralled with her stories. Turns out she was a receptionist for Warner Brothers music.

--back to the review--

But this is Chuck Palahniuk, a master of the postmodern, and the best part of his book is his treatment of that other form of -ography, the autobiography.  To say more would be to wreck it for others, but consider that one of the central characters in this novel is Lillian Hellman, author and playwright, who was notorious for penning a series of memoirs in which the facts weren't always the facts. I'll leave it to others to figure out...I ended this book with a huge chuckle. And I liked it.

Read slowly, don't focus on the names too much ...there's an awesome and very ironic story here that will make you either laugh at the end or smack yourself in the head when you figure it all out. To all the naysayers of this book -- go read it again -- it's near genius. This is a book that demands active reader participation...you have to think about this one.

*Big Fish: A Novel of Mythic Proportions, by Daniel Wallace

Big Fish is a quiet little book, not so much a novel as a series of small vignettes about the life of one Edward Bloom, who is now dying. Edward was one of those people for whom a day-to-day life with his family just wasn't enough, so he ended up missing a lot of his son William's life. As he's laying there dying, William begs to know more about his father, but Edward, who is the king of the one-liners, answers his son's questions with more jokes and reminisces of life before William came along. The book is William's way of trying to know and understand his father -- it is William's  construction of Edward's life based on Edward's often over-the-top stories.

Edward's tall tales are like a sign pointing William in a general direction toward the truth of his father's life: no matter what situation Edward found himself in, it was always important to him to be the big fish in the small pond. Edward notes that he always wanted to be a great man, and that he always felt it was his destiny to be so. William's reconstruction, which in many ways mythologizes Edward, is his attempt at making his absent father the great man he always wanted to be, even though William feels that a great man is someone of whom it could be said that he was loved by his son. The "myths" William creates about his father in this book are a step toward not only William being able to connect at some level with Edward before he dies, but are also William's way of loving his father as best he can.


Big Fish is a small book, but read it slowly because there is a lot to uncover here.

A note about the Tim Burton film: the movie picks up these little vignettes and expands them into fuller stories, and is a joy to watch as well as a full-fledged tear jerker at times.  If you haven't seen the movie, read the book first so you get more into William's head.

*The Ghost, by Robert Harris

Simon and Schuster, 2007
1416551816

I recently saw a trailer for a movie that I thought looked really interesting, filled with political intrigue and action. The name of that film was The Ghostwriter, and it was made by Roman Polanski. -- As a sidebar, Polanski is an awesome director, and I loved his "A Pure Formality." -- Imagine my surprise when "The Ghostwriter" turned out to be based on The Ghost, by Robert Harris,  which I've had sitting on my shelf ever since it came out. I figured perhaps this would be a great time to read it, since I want to see the film. 


To leak much about this novel would be to spoil it, so I won't go into any detail here.   The main character of this novel (whose name we never learn) is by profession a ghostwriter. His biggest project was the memoirs of a has-been '70s rock star, and it is this work that gets him a very lucrative contract to ghostwrite the highly-anticipated memoirs of Britain's most current ex-Prime Minister, Adam Lang. Lang and entourage have stationed themselves at the home of a wealthy friend in Martha's Vineyard. The ghostwriter accepts, and it's off to mingle with the ex PM and get down to work sorting out and cleaning up a very poorly-written, mediocre memoir written by the ghostwriter's predecessor, who mysteriously ended up dead. The new writer's job is to turn it into the multi-million dollar blockbuster the publishers are waiting for.  But just when the narrator/ghostwriter gets to Martha's Vineyard, all hell breaks loose as his subject finds himself on the verge of being the focus of an investigation by the War Crimes Court. I will say no more.

Harris takes his time setting up the story, so it begins slowly, but picks up speed as it goes on and gets more into political suspense-thriller mode.  And if you are even the least bit familiar with post 9/11 politics, you'll notice that quite a few of the characters bear a remarkable resemblance to some of the real-life players, adding a layer of interest that keeps you reading. Sadly, my devious mind figured out a part of the end early on so that was a bit disappointing and there were a couple of plot holes that bothered me, but all in all it was a pretty decent read,  and I liked it. This one I finished in one sitting -- that should say something about the suspense quotient. Now it's off to the movies.


note: If you decide to stick this one on your tbr pile, you might be interested in this "story behind the story" so to speak here, in a 2007 interview with Robert Harris just after this book was first published.

--listed at paperback swap, but if you want this book before it gets taken, first emailer takes it!

NEXT UP:  The African Queen, by C.S. Forester

*The Shadow Year, by Jeffrey Ford

Winner of the 2009 World Fantasy Award, The Shadow Year is another good book by Jeffrey Ford.  It's also on the longlist for this year's International IMPAC Dublin Award.  If you haven't read anything by this author, you are really missing out. He's a very good writer, and the other books I've read of his are The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque and The Girl in the Glass, both of which are offbeat but well worth your attention.  


Shadow Year  is set in the 1960s, in a small town on Long Island. It's a coming of age story, a quasi-mystery story, with a bit of speculative fiction all thrown in together. I've seen this book compared with Stephen King's writing, and yes, perhaps to a wee bit, I can see why.  Here, though, we're introduced to a rather sad and dysfunctional family.  The main character of the novel is a 6th grade boy who lives with his older brother Jim, a younger sister Mary, and a set of parents who have some serious problems. Mom is an alcoholic and lives in a quasi stupor most of the time, while Dad works three jobs to make ends meet.  The children's grandparents live in an apartment attached to the house. The sixth grader is the narrator of the story (we're not given his name), and through his eyes events of a particular year unravel themselves.   While Mary runs numbers in her head and plays with imaginary friends to help cope, the boys have their own space in the cellar below the stairs: Botch Town, where the town they live in has been faithfully recreated out of clay and what ever other materials are handy. The boys often go down and recreate events happening throughout the town using the clay figures they've created.

As the story gets rolling, strange occurrences begin to take place.  A prowler is looking in through windows throughout the neighborhood.  Jim decides that the boys will take on the case and while they're working on that, a boy from the narrator's school disappears.  Even worse, the boys come across a man dressed all in white (known as Mr. White) driving a white car with bubble top and fins, who starts watching them. But as these events happen, the boys realize that Mary's a step ahead of them and has recreated them in Botch Town.

The reader is drawn in from the very beginning and stays there throughout the novel. You want to know what happens not just in the sense of these strange events, but to the family as well, because you genuinely care about all of these characters. Plus, Ford has this incredible way of evoking a nostalgia; my guess would be especially from people who grew up during the 60s. There's a reality to the atmosphere he creates that keeps you reading more. There are parts that are downright laugh out loud funny, while the family situation and other, more grief-laden scenes keep it real. And although the final payoff may not be as worthy as the tension that grips you up to that point, it's still a strangely satisfying ending.


Definitely recommended. 
 

*The Time In Between, by David Bergen

Another entry on my reading list for March, The Time In Between won the 2005 Scotiabank Giller Prize, which recognizes "excellence in Canadian fiction." If you're interested, you can read about it here.  And imho, this book definitely deserved a prize of some sort. 


On the back cover of my copy of The Time in Between there is a blurb from the San Francisco Chronicle saying "A sparse and moving meditation on the burden of war across generations." I couldn't have described it better.  As the book begins, Ada Boatman and her brother Jon are in Vietnam to search for their father Charles. He had gone back to Vietnam some thirty years after he was a soldier there to try and deal with his feelings about a certain painful experience while in the army, a part of his personal story his family doesn't know about. He revisited his time in Vietnam in his head after reading a book given to him by a friend and felt compelled to go back.  But after some time, his family stopped hearing from him; Charles has seemingly just disappeared. The story has two narratives that ultimately weave together - the story of Charles and his need to return to Vietnam and what he finds there, and then Ada's story, and what she finds when she goes in search of her father.

In literature, sometimes less is more. Bergen's work may be short and rather subdued in parts, but it is powerful and carries real emotion. Charles' story is excellently handed down and his character is drawn neatly so that he becomes real. Ada's story was okay, but not the best part of this novel. In any case, this is another one I'd recommend. People who enjoy reading about the past's pull on the present, or who enjoy novels about Vietnam and its aftereffects on the human psyche may also like this book.

*This Blinding Absence of Light, by Tahar Ben Jalloun

T

This Blinding Absence of Light won the Dublin IMPAC award in 2004.  The shortlist for that year includes

• The Book of Illusions by Paul Auster (an incredible book, one not to miss)
• Any Human Heart,  by William Boyd
• Caramelo, by Sandra Cisneros
• Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides (another not-to-miss novel)
• The White Family, by Maggie Gee
• Balthasar's Odyssey, by Amin Maalouf
• Family Matters, by Rohinton Mistry
• Earth and Ashes, by Atiq Rahimi, and
• House of Day, House of Night, by Olga Tokarczuk.

Ben Jalloun's novel is based on the story of one Aziz Binebine,  who was sentenced to a 20-year stretch of time in the hellhole prison of Tazmamart for his role in the 1971 attempted coup of King Hassan II's Moroccan government. You can read about it here, in this article written the same year.  The novel is fictional, but living conditions in the underground prison (now destroyed) are not.  It is a study of the  human will to survive under the most unimaginable and unspeakable conditions.

 The book examines the story of one character, who like others who were sentenced there, was living in an underground cell, so small that even something as ordinary as sitting was an impossibility. Cockroaches and scorpions were co-inhabitants, as was the constant darkness.  The food kept the prisoners alive, but just barely. Many of the prisoners turned to their faith in Allah and to the Qu'ran to make it through their ordeal, while the main character, Salim, turned deeply inward, letting go of both memory, because "to remember was to die," and of the physicality of his body.

This Blinding Absence of Light is one of those books you must actually experience for yourself -- book reviews and descriptions of it can't really do the story justice. If you have a low tolerance for human despair, or you're in the mood for something happy,  forget this one. Difficult to read at many points (and on many levels), this book left me considering the cruelty that can more often than not accompany power. It's also a reminder that in some cases, Hell already exists on earth.

Forest Gate, by Peter Akinti (Amazon Vine)

First, a big thank you to the Amazon Vine program, and also Simon and Schuster, who sent me a second, finished copy of this book.

Forest Gate begins with a terrible act: two teenage boys decide between themselves to commit suicide by jumping off of two towers. One, Ashvin, succeeds; the other, James, is horribly injured but survives. Ashvin and his sister Meina are refugees from Somalia, which the author notes in an interview is "one of the few countries in the world that is officially ungovernable." (209) Their parents were killed in the ongoing civil wars in that country, and they were brought to London by their benefactor, Mr. Bloom, a friend of Ashvin & Meina's parents. James and Meina are brought together after Ashvin's death, and the story is told from their alternating points of view.

And what an eye-opening, character-driven story it is. James, who was poor and black and lived in council estates constantly felt as if the rest of the world was judging him solely by those parameters. His mother was a crack addict, his father was dead, and his brothers were all major known drug dealers. James did not want to end up in the same boat, but understood that escape was probably highly unlikely. Before his death, Ashvin came to realize that the wars that he had escaped from in Somalia were still being played out in different forms on the streets of London via the gangs of immigrants and refugees who had come there. And Meina, who had lived a horrible life in Somalia after the death of her parents (married off to six husbands before she was even in her teens), has her own need to escape, but wonders if she ever can.  Meeting after Ashvin's death, both James and Meina are drawn to each other to begin their own collective and individual healing processes.

This book is one of those stories that knock you out of your comfort zone and force you to take a good look at what's happening in the world around you. We are so complacent about civil wars in Africa, because they're across the world from us and our entire experience may be just a news story on television once in a while. We don't really think about the consequences of these conflicts that bring immigrants seeking refuge and asylum to other parts of the world, where they can be lifted out of the horror of wars, but often form into cultural "gangs" and continue the cycle of bloodshed and violence against each other. And truthfully, even if we mean well, we cannot possibly understand life in a situation where there is little hope for change or betterment or escape, where we are forced to stay where we are because of the color of our skin or our ethnicity. And that's why Forest Gate is so powerful. It makes you aware, even if only on the slightest level, that all of these things exist in the world. I hope many people read this book -- it's got a very deep message that applies to everyone. Akinti is a talented writer, his characters come alive on the page, and what's more, he has personal experience of what he's written. I liked it and recommend it, with the caveat that it's very graphically violent in a few places.  There aren't a lot of warm fuzzy moments in this book -- it is bleak, yet the reader is left with the sense that perhaps, just perhaps, these two people can start all over again.

The Risk of Infidelity Index, by Christopher G. Moore

On to the third of my cruise reads. Actually, I picked this one up from the ship's library due to my constant fear of running out of books while on vacation. I have read about this series, but this is the first time I've picked up one of this author's novels. I liked it and first thing today I ordered my own copy, and scoped out the other books in the series.

The main character in this book, set in Bangkok, is Vincent Calvino, an ex-pat New Yorker who runs his private eye business out of an office in the same building as a massage parlor. He's just finished a huge surveillance gig, gathering evidence for an attorney who asked him to get the goods on a major drug piracy operation. Everything is looking up, except that Vincent broke one of his cardinal rules: get the money up front. His failure to do so causes him severe problems when the client dies of a heart attack in a toilet. To make matters even worse, he stumbles onto the body of one of the girls from the massage parlor at her place of business, attracting the attention of the local police who don't trust him anyway. As if this isn't bad enough, in order to make ends meet he does two things: first, he tries to put pressure on associates of the dead client (and the bad guys on whom he dug up the evidence)  in order to get paid, and he agrees to take a job for a group of women who put stock in a book called "The Risk of Infidelity Index." This book lists Bangkok as the number one spot in the world where husbands will be unfaithful, and his job is to find evidence that the husbands are cheating.  Neither one of these options, as it turns out, are ideal, and get our man Calvino into a world of trouble.

Moore has developed some great characters here, including Calvino himself, Calvino's good friend Colonel Pratt, a local high-ranking policeman who has a knack for spewing Shakespeare in appropriate moments, an Italian chef who gives cooking lessons to the cheated-on spouses but can't speak Italian, an associate of the dead attorney who has an eidetic memory and stands on principle, and even the bad guy, who is one nasty piece of work.  But it's not just the characters that make the book -- Bangkok itself becomes so real you can feel the steam from the humidity.  Moore is an awesome and talented writer, and it's a shame that not many more of his works are available here. This book is actually #9 in the series, so I do believe I've probably come into the series a bit too late, and I'm sure I've missed something. But that's okay. This book holds it own as far as I'm concerned.

I would recommend it to people who enjoy crime fiction, and to those who want something different from the norm in their reading. It's an engrossing story and it's well plotted, and should appeal to people who are more inclined toward noir with an exotic twist. Overall...a good find, considering I picked it totally out of thin air.

Disgrace, by JM Coetzee*

Disgrace won the Booker Prize in 1999, and then in 2000 won the Commonwealth Writer's Prize. 

This is a tough book not only to review, but to summarize as well.  Truthfully, it's been analyzed, reanalyzed, argued about, etc, and there are places you can go all over the internet to find a good review.  One of the best is  here, written by  Andrew O'Hehir for Salon.com in 1999.  I direct you there, because there is no way I could possibly relate it like this man does.

Disgrace is an extremely powerful novel, and as one who constantly kept up with events in South Africa in the 90s, it's very obvious to me that Coetzee's book is a statement about the changes brought about by the end of apartheid, not always for the good, at a time when all of the pent-up anger and frustrations were as much a part of the atmosphere as oxygen. His book is set during this time and reflects a changing social regime where everyone is having to relearn their own understandings of the concepts of identity, place and privilege.  He pulls this off so well that you really don't even have to think about it to comprehend where he's going with this book.

When I read Lolita earlier this year, I began to realize that there are writers, and then there are writers.  People in the second category make literature a veritable art form.  They are capable of displaying their inner genius on the page much like Rembrandt or Vermeer displayed theirs on canvases. These writers are few and far between, but Coetzee definitely belongs with them. This is only the second book of his that I've read (the first was Summertime, read last summer), but I know without a doubt that no matter what book I might pick up that was written by this man, I will not be disappointed.

Disgrace doesn't appeal to everyone, as many reviews show, and in no way, shape or form is it a feel-good, warm-fuzzies sort of novel. This is probably not the book for you if you are a reader who wants a clear-cut narrative where you're entertained without having to think or examine your own feelings as you go through the story. Otherwise, give it a try.

as an afterward, there was a movie made from this book (I think in '08); it's available here in the US at the end of April on DVD. I will definitely be watching this one.

*Fieldwork, by Mischa Berlinski

my edition

In an afterword to this novel, the author notes that at first he was going to write a nonfiction book about Christian missionary work among a Thai native tribe, but then changed his mind. I'm so glad he did.

I bought Fieldwork nearly two years ago and just got around to reading it. My first thought after reading it was "this was only a finalist for the National Book Award? Jeez...I have to go look up what won that year and read it" because this book was so good. So off to the internet I went, looked up that year's winner, and discovered that the winning book was Denis Johnson's Tree of Smoke, which was one of my favorite books for 2008.  It is one of those rare novels that comes along in which the quality of writing is simply exquisite.  The story is good, well plotted and holds throughout the novel,  and the thread of continuity never gets lost among the details.  It's also obvious that the author did a great deal of research. His characterizations are vividly real and the story is utterly believable. In fact, I had to keep reminding myself that this book was fiction.

Expat American, young journalist  Mischa Berlinski (yes, he uses his own name for the main character here), has come to Thailand with his  girlfriend, a schoolteacher. A local character, another expat, comes to Mischa with a story about a woman named Martiya van der Leun, who came to Thailand some years back to study a hill tribe known as the Dyalo for her PhD work in Anthropology. It turns out that Martiya had been sentenced to fifty years in Chiang Mai prison for the murder of a Christian missionary, but Martiya had committed suicide while serving her term.   Berlinski wants to know how this woman went from such a promising life and career to rotting in a Thai prison, and sets out to get her story.  In the course of his own research, he delves into the lives of the missionaries, the Dyalo, Martiya's family, her friends & lovers, and her co-workers to try to understand what really happened.

The book has been criticized by readers for many reasons -- the biggest one being that there's too much detail about the missionaries or about the Dyalo, and that the story gets bogged down, but I have to disagree. Just as Martiya felt she had to know things from the natives' point of view to really understand these people, the reader in this case won't really get the whole story  without understanding the various factors that led up to the fateful moment that put Martiya behind the walls of Chiang Mai prison.

I loved this book and I would recommend it to anyone who wants an extremely well-written and highly intelligent novel. Books like this one are rare, so you should grab the opportunity.

*Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov

my edition

Lolita is one of those books that you're either going to love or you're going to hate. I choose the former -- it is simply superb.


I fell in love with Nabokov after reading Pale Fire, but I'd never read Lolita. Truthfully, this book has been sitting on my bookshelf for years, because I was hesitant to read it due to the subject matter. Yes, the main character is a pedophile, yes, the subject in question is 12 years old. No, I do not condone sex with children or even adult fascination with "nymphets." However, Lolita, as it turns out, is a masterpiece, an outstanding read, and my faith in Nabokov remains justified.

I won't go through the plot details, but I think this book has been much misunderstood and my suspicion is that most readers who hated this book probably either did not finish it all the way through or missed the point entirely.

Nabokov's writing is simply superb, exquisite, and all of the other superlatives you can possibly think of. The man was a genius with his use of the English language and his depiction of post-WWII American culture. I found myself reading this book very slowly so as not to miss a single word or a single nuance. His writing is filled with word play, he uses comedy to balance out the tragedy of it all, and reading the book was an experience.

In considering your feelings about Lolita, you have to remember that Humbert Humbert is an unreliable narrator at best -- very sly, self-serving and downright devious. I never at any point in time felt sorry for him, but without giving away the show, the ending of this novel (not the very end, but close to, when he meets up with Lolita after some time) was simply beautiful. Nabokov wasn't at all sanctioning pedophilia ... if you read carefully, and finish the entire book, you'll find it's just the opposite.

An amazing book, I'd definitely recommend it to anyone who enjoys a reading masterpiece...here, literature definitely shines as art to be savored and enjoyed.

linked to Cym Lowell's Book Review Party Wednesday, April 14, 2010