A Dance With Dragons - George R.R. Martin

The latest installment in the series, and in the interest of avoiding spoilers and redundancy, I'll not summarize or talk about the plot lines. But there is something about this book that irks me, although the irritation it inspires is different in kind than the one produced by its immediate precursor, A Feast for Crows, which was an overlong and overwrought chapter in the larger story. A Dance With Dragons is in fact of equivalent quality to the second book in the series, A Clash of Kings, but it does not rise up to the excellence of the first and third books, A Game of Thrones and A Storm of Swords, respectively. And yet they all share the same fatal flaw, which, in the end might not be a flaw at all; namely, there is no end. It seems silly to view the series as a whole in critical terms until it's complete, and so you're left with mindless wondering about how the story will eventually unfold.

Although I can't help mindlessly speculate that the theme of the books will eventually be: Blood tells. Which is abhorrent, yet par for the course in the epic high fantasy genre, although I had hoped that Martin was trying to undermine this tired trope.

The Passion Artist - John Hawkes

Would it be necessary to pursue fleeing women into those ravished buildings? Would inmates and volunteers grapple with each other in dark rooms where ordinarily and under lock and key these same women slept during their endless and unnatural nights? In the midst of his fellows and standing inside the walls of La Violaine at last, suddenly he began to feel that he recognized the yard, the buildings, the catacombs and labyrinths of this world of women, as if he too were a prisoner in this very place and had always been so.
-pg 50 (Dalkey Archive ed)

The man referred to here is Konrad Vost, a widower who lives in a nameless city attached to a large women's prison called La Violaine. Vost lives an unremarkable life marked more by routine and habit than anything else, and aside from the demands of work and keeping his spare house in order for the sake of his daughter, he makes a daily visit to a cafe across from the prison, which is also called La Violaine, where the husbands and relatives of the incarcerated women all wait, each day, more as a ritual act of devotion than out of any expectation that their wives, daughters, or mothers will be freed. The woman for whom Vost waits is his mother, who is serving time for murdering Vost's father.

The only remarkable aspect of Vost's life is that it is defined by women, and not only by their mere absence or presence in his life, but also by their transgressions against him. His mother kills his father, his wife sleeps with another man, and, as the narrative unfolds, we find out that his daughter, far from being the perfect picture of a young student, has taken up prostitution. Later on, we come to find out that Vost's entire life has been one of suffered indignity at the hands of women, but in the story it is his daughter's turn toward prostitution that seems to jolt him into action. As soon as he finds out, he haplessly hires one of his daughter's schoolmates, who is a prostitute as well, and that marks the beginning of Vost's initial transformation into a man who is striving against the power that women seem to have had over his entire life.

After his tryst with the girl, the women in the prison riot, revolt and take control of the prison, forcing the men in the city to organize a response. Vost joins in and takes part in the battle for the prison, trading sex for violence in his struggle against women, and the violent and sex-filled narrative that follows is a peculiar odyssey of discovery and revelation, wherein Vost comes to understand and break free of the prison of his misogyny.

Thematically, the book runs the risk of being precious, or pat, but it is the way in which it is told that allows the book its modest success; Hawkes's nightmare-dread prose is operating at the same high caliber you would expect if you had read any of his other books. The physicality of the theme and the action matches well with his sensual style, and the horror intrinsic in his internal life is heightened by the dream-like quality of his writing. But, and there always seems to be a but for me when speaking of Hawkes, the book is not one of the best of his that I have read, and even the prose seems not to rise as high in its achievement as it does in, say, The Beetle Leg or The Lime Twig. Nevertheless, I know of no other book that treats the subject of misogyny so frighteningly, and Vost's strange cast of mind becomes, by the end, entirely familiar, even if its starting point of upended gender roles seems so alien at the beginning.

The God of Small Thing by Arundhati Roy

This is a book that I have begun many times but just recently pushed myself to finish! The story itself is wonderfully constructed; it has a gripping plot and the narrative is masterfully structured. In this story, Arundhati Roy unfolds the many layers of history belonging to a prominent Indian family in Ayemenem. The family has achieved its prominence through a pickling company founded by the grandmother. This factory becomes a central stronghold for the communist party, and even though the present owner of the factory, the son, is sympathetic to the worker’s needs, he is unable to meet their demands. This cleverly reveals the political climate of India while also tracing the family’s rise and fall.


The rise and fall of the family is also determined by the actions of the family members themselves. The narrative (3rd person) is structured in such a way so that the reader knows what will happen, but not quite how. Certain images from the story are woven in repeatedly before the event even takes place. In this sense the unfolding of the narrative is truly masterful, where the climax does not depend on the action itself because we are familiar with it, but at the exposure of the true personalities of the characters whence the events are properly described to us, some are hopeless, some helpless, but the most shocking character is cunningly and frighteningly evil.

Although the narrative is impressive, it must be said that the writing itself is abhorrently pretentious. The most concise example I can give is Roy’s use of similes. She uses them very liberally to the extent where two similes may be matched to one comparison. Automatically one way which Roy could improve her writing is by using only one simile per comparison. I have no idea why her editor did not think of that. Secondly, some similes were such far reaches and served no literary purpose. For example, she compares the permanence of something to government jobs. Being Greek, I know first-hand what that means, but it just didn’t fit in with the atmosphere of the novel. I understand that she is trying to emphasize the social and political climate of India, but she should save it for another novel rather than polluting this superbly structured story with useless words. I caught myself rolling my eyes many times while reading this novel.

If you can ignore the obnoxious similes and the other superfluous language that is pungent like perfume in the duty free stores of frantic and sleepless airports filled with bodies moving at different paces or like the intoxicating smell of diesel gas that somehow seeps into the car, even on cold days when the windows are rolled up tight to prevent the cold from biting, then I say read it because it is a meaningful story.

Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh

My theme is memory, that winged host that soared about me one grey morning of war-time.

These memories, which are my life--for we possess nothing certainly except the past--were always with me. Like the pigeons of St. Mark's, they were everywhere, under my feet, singly, in pairs, in little honey-voiced congregations, nodding, strutting, winking, rolling the tender feathers of their necks, perching sometimes, if I stood still, on my shoulder or pecking a broken biscuit from between my lips; until, suddenly, the noon gun boomed and in a moment, with a flutter and sweep of wings, the pavement was bare and the whole sky above dark with a tumult of fowl. Thus it was that morning.

The book is subtitled The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder, and here Ryder takes a step back from the story that he has been telling, essentially to himself, to reinforce Waugh's theme of the peculiar nature of the grace of the Catholic god, and of the unbeliever coming into the fold. This brief quotation combines several of the book's more notable features; that the narrative of events occurs almost entirely in the past, remembered by Charles Ryder; that the author uses elaborate metaphors and is capable of pulling them off quite beautifully; the wry misdirection of phrases such as 'for we possess nothing certainly except the past,' which litter the novel like a false trail of breadcrumbs. The inclusion of St. Mark's is no accident, nor is the broken biscuit in the mouth, and the deft circling around from the image of memories as a flock of angels that draw the mind to higher things to the image of startled and startling flock of pigeons leaving St. Mark's square bare underlines the economy of both Waugh's prose as well as his thematic dexterity.

The book begins with Charles Ryder serving as an officer during World War II, coincidentally stationed at the family seat of his estranged childhood friend Sebastian Flyte, and the location turns Ryder's thoughts to when he first met Sebastian when attending university. The narrative then begins in earnest, with Ryder recounting his dissolute university days, his meeting the Flyte family, the descent of Sebastian into a rather pure state of alcoholism. Later, Ryder moves on to describe the tragedy of his own life, wherein he marries and becomes a successful architectural painter, only to find himself in love with Sebastian's sister, Julia, who is married, as well. They have an affair, going so far as to break off their marriages, but in the end, it does not end well.

Or doesn't it? Despite the somber tone of the tale, and Ryder's eventual ostensibly lonely end, there is, hidden beneath the narrative, the theme of conversion that comes to life in the end. It is a flaw, a flaw that this book shares with some Graham Greene novels; namely, that the story seems to be of secondary concern, and that it is the Catholicism that matters. To be clear, it is not the fact that the book's theme is religious that irks me, it is that it is so deviously slipped in. The above quotation, which I think truly gets to the heart of the book beneath its attempts at misdirection, is followed by this passage, where Ryder is thinking on the memories of those moments that rise above the unremarkable moments that make up most lives:

The human soul enjoys these rare, classic periods, but, apart from them, we are seldom single or unique; we keep company in this world with a hoard of abstractions and reflections and counterfeits of ourselves--the sensual man, the economic man, the man of reason, the beast, the machine and the sleep-walker, and heaven knows what besides, all in our own image, indistinguishable from ourselves to the outward eye. We get borne along, out of sight in the press, unresisting, till we get the chance to drop behind unnoticed, or to dodge down a side street, pause, breathe freely and take our bearings, or to push ahead, outdistance our shadows, lead them a dance, so that when at length they catch up with us, they look at one another askance, knowing we a have a secret we shall never share.

I can't help but think that this novel would have been better had Charles Ryder kept that secret in his breast, locked away, and that Waugh kills the subtlety of his theme by hitting it, right at the end, on the head.

Amseterdam - Ian McEwan

Besides, in Vernon's life lately there was so much to think about, so much of the real world that thrilled, that mere fantasy could hardly compete. What he had said, what he would say, how it went down, the next move, the unraveling consequences of success... In the accumulating momentum of the week, practically every hour had revealed to Vernon new aspects of his powers and potential, and as his gifts for persuasion and planning began to produce results, he felt large and benign, a little ruthless, perhaps, but ultimately good, capable of standing alone against the current, seeing over the heads of his contemporaries, knowing that he was about to shape the destiny of his country and that he could bear the responsibility. More than bear--he needed this weight, his gifts needed the weight that no one else could shoulder.
-Pg 109

So thinks the Vernon the unremarkable newspaper man, who until the political scandal he is helping to stoke came to light, was described as an empty vessel of a human being whose position as an editor of a failing newspaper was a matter of chance and coincidence rather than any real ambition or skill. His hubris is notable only in that it is the unconvincing peak of his character's arc, and is the ham-handedly given key to this ham-fisted morality tale of an entertainment. Vernon, like the other main character in the book, Clive, a successful composer who falls short of his own aspirations to genius, is petty. In fact every other character in the book is petty, each armed with the commonplace instinct to disregard any idea of moral fortitude in the quest to get ahead. And in the end, although the two main characters suffer for their sins (the punishment brought about by an extremely unconvincing deux ex machina), the theme is not that the righteous will prevail, but that two awful men brought down by their own actions are merely representative of a society peopled with other, equally detestable human beings.

Is it funny? Perhaps, but not particularly so, as the humor is undercut consistently by the sense that reading the book is an utter waste of time. What it reminds me of is a Boccaccio story that has been stretched so as to make it long enough to be publishable as a novel (aided by a large type that indicts the publishers of this book with the same cynicism that is embodied by the books characters), which by being overly lengthened distributes the weight and heft of the tale in a diffuse, inefficient way. It seems like the whole point of the book was to introduce the cute trick that ends it, and although McEwan has a good grasp on the vicissitudes of newspaper men, artists, and politicians alike and can use his fluid prose to present the story in a painless way, the whole thing is undermined by the feeling that much of the detail included about the characters was introduced as needless filler, mealy potatoes added to the gristly meat in a watery, all-too-common stew.

Moby-Dick; or, The Whale by Herman Melville

One often hears of writers that rise and swell with their subject, though it may seem but an ordinary one. How, then, with me, writing of this Leviathan? Unconsciously my chirography expands into placard capitals. Give me the condor's quill! Give me Vesuvius' crater for an inkstand! Friends, hold my arms! For in the mere act of penning my thoughts of this Leviathan, they weary me, and make me faint with their out-reaching comprehensiveness of sweep, as if to include the whole circle of the sciences, and all the generations of whales, and men, and mastodons, past, present, and to come, with all the revolving panoramas of empire on earth, and throughout the whole universe, not excluding its suburbs. Such, and so magnifying, is the virtue of a large and liberal theme! We expand to its bulk. To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be who have tried it.
-pg 471 (Bantam Classic)

By the time the reader runs across these lines, Melville in fact has accomplished what this passage describes; he's written a book that, while ostensibly about whales and one whale in particular, is used as a vehicle to explore everything. What is more surprising than his ambition is the execution, and how even in the descriptions of the most technical aspects of whaling he manages to be both edifying and entertaining. Or, at least, this was surprising to me, having long held the perhaps common misconception that this book is 'about' Ahab's quest for the white whale Moby-Dick.

What I found almost as enjoyable as the questing narrative, or the action of the hunting of the whales, was the descriptions of all the processes of the whaling world; the whales' biology; and, even, Melville's detours into the suburbs of the narrative, such as when he considers the dread that whiteness produces in men (there might be some connection here between Poe's Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym and Moby-Dick). But more than the sheer enjoyment of reading Ishmael talk about the importance of whaling, its history, the methods for hunting, killing, and processing the beasts mid-ocean, I was struck by how convincing it all is; I found myself believing, quite willingly, that the sum total of human knowledge of Cetacea was contained in this book; that nothing more had been discovered since; that here, when reading, in my hands was the key to that world. It was like a different order of the willing suspension of disbelief, that although Wikipedia might be a click away to discover, truly, what ambergris is, or the entire historical process for dismantling a whale, I preferred to be led by Ishmael's encyclopedic knowledge, however dated it might be.

Part of it, of course, is Melville's prose, and although almost any passage plucked from the text would serve to illustrate this point, as, even, the quotation above does, there are some moments of surpassing eloquence, that manage to both describe and inspire, such as this one, in which Ishmael describes their arrival to the South Pacific:

There is, one knows not what sweet mystery about this sea, whose gently awful stirrings seem to speak of some hidden soul beneath; like those fabled undulations of the Ephesian sod over the buried Evangelist St. John. And meet it is, that over these sea-pastures, wide-rolling watery prairies and Potters' Fields of all four continents, the waves should rise and fall, and ebb and flow unceasingly; for here, millions of mixed shades and shadows, drowned dreams, somnambulisms, reveries; all that we call lives and souls, lie dreaming, dreaming, still; tossing like slumberers in their beds; the ever-rolling waves but made so by their restlessness.
--pg 498

And although the prose here is stellar, the rhythm rising and falling as naturally as waves, the thematic depth that he achieves in such a short passage is particularly noteworthy and representative of the book in general. The Pacific, which serves well as a synecdoche for the ocean as a whole, is a vast graveyard for the entire world, over which the living observer travels, conscious of the "the tidebeating heart of the earth," which might stand for history or simply life, or both, in fact. In this way the passage also has an ourobourian quality to it, that if one considers the ocean, one is considering the land; if one is considering the dead then one must needs be thinking of those who have yet to pass; and so the passage serves to illustrate the thematic link between whale and man; they are complementary, and each worthy of a grand book to describe them to those who would listen.

Invitation to a Beheading by Vladimir Nabakov

The story opens with the main character, Cincinattus, receiving his death sentence and then returning to his prison cell. One very important thing that no one tells Cincinattus is when he is scheduled to die. Through a good portion of the novel he is trying to acquire this piece of information while being subjected to absurd, theatrical behavior of those around him such as the prison guard, prison director and a fellow prisoner. Furthermore, they continuously scold him and shoot him dirty looks for being apathetic towards their services.

This novel has a very dream-like element reflecting the absurdity of those around Cincinattus, ultimately a metaphor for society. Everyone knows what is happening, even what day Cincinattus is due to be beheaded, but they don’t let him in on it.

A very powerful scene that shows someone with some kind of understanding of Cinncinatus’s character is when his mother comes to visit him. Although he categorizes her with everyone else, in a world made of “tarbrush time”, she attempts to make sense of him unlike the other characters. Seeing her son in his prison cell she makes an apt connection to a toy from her childhood,

“Well, you would have a crazy mirror like that and whole collection of different nonnons, absolutely absurd objects, shapeless, mottles, pockmarked, knobby things, like some kind of fossils – but the mirror which completely distorted ordinary objects, no you see got real food, that is, when you placed one of these incomprehensible, monstrous objects so that it was reflected in the incomprehensible, monstrous mirrors, a marvelous thing happened… everything was restored, everything was fine, and the shapeless speckledness became in the mirror a wonderful, sensible image” (pg 105).

It is clear that Cinncinatus is one of these “absurd objects” but when put in front of a crazy mirror, he becomes a “sensible image”. His mother recognizes that there is beauty in her son. But she doesn’t see it, nor does she let him know when his execution will take place, so in Cinncinatus’s head she is no better than anyone else.

For such heavy material, this book is read at a quick pace. Things move quickly and everything is dreamlike. At one point, when they are whisking Cinncinatus away to his execution they clear out his cell as if it were a stage. Everything turns out to be a prop, even the little spider that kept Cinncinatus company. At one point, I had to put the book down because I reached a point where the psychological twists and turns were too upsetting. Oddly enough, I have done this with a book before, Lolita, also by Nabakov. No matter how disturbing it can be, it is a worthwhile read. Nabakov successfully takes his readers to another world, unknown to us and makes it completely realistic.