It started with a huge novel by an Australian prosecutor named Eliot Perlman called Seven Types Of Ambiguity. It tells the story of a kidnapping and the successive trial from the points of view of seven of the involved parties. It’s got a Dickensian (both a word and a style that I love) quality in its political and social scope, but also gets very po-mo with its different narrators and the way it shows how truth varies from person to person. Simply one of the best novels I’ve ever read, but it’s a serious undertaking.
Also read Joan Didion’s memoir called The Year Of Magical Thinking about the year after her husband’s death during which she was also dealing with her daughter being sick. Brutal and honest stuff. Not something you’d want to read just for fun, but if you’ve ever lost a person this is about as good a memoir on grieving as you’re going to find (C.S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed is the only other better thing I’ve read).
Then I went for a wonderful satire by Max Barry called Company. Barry also wrote a book satirizing advertising called Jennifer Government that I loved—Company takes on corporate culture. As often happens with satires, the plot just sort of unravels at a certain point, but it’s so worth it for the horrid and painful truths in the first half of the book. If you’ve never worked in a corporate office, it would probably just seem like absurdism, but – tragically – it’s not.
Kevin Brockmeier wrote a book called The Short History Of The Dead that is far from perfect but I’ll always remember because it has one of the best ideas I’ve ever heard for a story. The book takes place (in even numbered chapters) sometimes in the future, as a plague of some sort is killing off virtually all humanity. One of the last people left living is a researcher in Antarctica. The odd-numbered chapters take place in a sort-of Purgatory-like City that’s somewhere after life but not quite like what we think of as death. It’s based on a belief prevalent in many African cultures that there are not two states of existence (alive and dead) like we assume in the Western world, but instead there are three: alive, dead but still remembered by the living, and ancestors (not necessarily people who have been forgotten, but those who are no longer remembered by the living). The odd numbered chapters make the book. The city first fills up drastically, then begins to drastically empty as quickly as it filled (all as a result of the plague). Ultimately, the only inhabitants left are those remembered by the researcher in the even-numbered chapters. It’s a very good book and there are some passages of writing that are excellent, but it’s such a neat idea I’m not sure any writer could have pulled it off.
Then I read Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro (the guy who wrote The Remains Of The Day). This book inexplicably takes place in the twentieth century, but in a different twentieth century than the actual one we just completed. It’s revealed slowly, but the essential idea is that clones were created, raised separately to adulthood, and then essentially used for parts. The book is the journal of one of these clones and it’s about as creepy as anything I’ve ever read. Her story is mostly mundane (schoolyard crush becomes lifelong flame), but the background of who they are and what future faces them is so abhorrent that it just paints every little action that might otherwise be boring or trite as painfully bittersweet. This is a book I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend to anyone.
Most recently, with a little urging from Brianna, I moved onto Daniel Handler (the guy who also writes as Lemony Snicket). I read his first novel The Basic Eight and loved it, and just finished his novel/short story collection Adverbs and loved maybe half of it. Handler is one of those writers who is as much or more interested in playing with language as he is in plot. That’s fine and interesting – it’s just not generally my preference. (I’m a plot guy. Tell me a good story and write well and I don’t care if there’s nothing new in the writing at all.) This worked out pretty well in The Basic Eight because he has 400 pages of novel to fill up so he essentially had to give us plot. And, really, there’s not that much plot – just enough. But his writing is entertaining enough to cover a lot of things that might have been flaws in other books. In general, I hate novels told in a series of letters or diary entries, but this “diary” worked. Flannery is entertaining to read. There’s an over-long section at the end that is almost all about circuitous writing and not at all about plot and that’s the only part of the book I didn’t just love. It should really be a movie (except they’d probably ruin it and they aren’t big on school killing movies since Columbine).
Adverbs is billed as a novel on the cover and true enough seems to contain many of the same characters … but it’s still really a collection of stories. As such, some are excellent, others are just semi-interesting exercises in complicated exposition. Still, there are a handful of the through-images that I just love from Adverbs: (1) The stories mostly take place in San Francisco in a time around (before, during, and after) a disaster of some kind. We don’t really know what. Maybe it’s an act of terrorism. Maybe it’s a volcano. Maybe it’s an earthquake (hey, it’s San Francisco). This is brilliant to me. The not knowing is cryptic and frightening, which is of course the point. What better expression of our national consciousness post-9/11? Moreover, it gets to the point of something I have always tried to work into stories about San Francisco, which is that an impending dread hangs over the place and did so even long before 9/11. The city is sitting right on top of probably the world’s most treacherous fault line. The city has been destroyed before, and very well may be again. But no one knows when. That feeling of uncertain but potentially approaching doom pervades many of the stories, and is wonderful. (2) Although the book is taking place in a recognizable place, it’s not really our world. It’s not our San Francisco, or it is but it’s not our world of culture. Characters have passionate discussions about music, naming bands that Handler has completely made up. If you try really hard you can maybe guess that he may or may not be referring to some real world bands (and places, etc). But maybe he’s just making it up. To his characters, though, the bands they talk about are as real as U2 and Shakira. It’s a nice touch and a tempting one to emulate.
Anyway. Having finished the Handler books, I’ve gone back to Perlman for a collection her wrote called The Reasons I Won’t Be Coming. The first story is one of those that just takes your breath away. Mine, anyway. The second story was also very good. I’m excited.
Other stuff I want to read soon, but may or may not get to:
Handler’s other books, the adult Watch Your Mouth and the Lemony Snicket series so that I’m caught up for #13 this fall
Levi’s American Vertigo essays
A memoir called Oh, The Glory Of It All, by Sean Willsey. But maybe I should wait until I’m working on a San Francisco book to pull out all the SF stuff. Also if I ever get around to writing that, I should re-read the best earthquake novels I've ever read, The Ground Beneath Her Feet (Salman Rushdie) and Strong Mation (Jonathan Franzen).
I’m always itching to re-read Bret Easton Ellis stuff. I’m thinking it might be time to revisit Glamorama.
Jose Saramago’s Seeing/Blindness books.
Who knows how much else?
No comments:
Post a Comment