Blindness by Jose Saramago

Blindness is a dystopian novel, depicting a society where a peculiar kind of white blindness is so highly contagious that practically everyone is affected by it and society discontinues to function in a civilized way. The readers are witness to the very first man that goes blind. After being helped home, and his wife’s return from work, the blind man goes to an Ophthalmologist who is baffled by this condition. Later that evening, it turns out that the patients in the waiting room and the ophthalmologist himself go blind. As the disease spreads rapidly, the diseased are quarantined. The Doctor’s wife lies that she has gone blind as well so that she may stay by her husband. Of course the quarantine is an awful place, where the corrupt patients seize control over everyone. However, the disease spread so fast that eventually the patients escape only to find a broken society with no government to facilitate, no water, no electricity, no nothing; just people living like animals, defecating and dying on the street and groping their way around to find food and survive. However, the doctor’s wife can still see and she with their close knit group are able to survive. In the end everyone can see again. The reason I told you what happened is because it’s a lame ending, and it doesn’t deserve the honor of being kept ambiguous.
Furthermore, the narration is painstaking as it has to rationalize every aspect and emotion of the character. To some extent, I believe that Saramago is just rationalizing his own fantasies. For example, at one point in the quarantine the doctor’s wife sees her husband sneaking into bed with another woman. Although she is hurt by this she is understanding and walks over there and practically gives her blessing. Like that would ever happen. At least let her pretend she didn’t see it. The doctor is lucky enough to have his wife with him (considering that she is described as pretty and obviously in obscenely patient), as so many families were split.

I also did not understand why Saramago did not use names. It is explained at one point (like everything else is, not leaving much up to the reader’s imagination), but it still didn’t make sense to me. The doctor is the doctor, his wife is the doctor’s wife, the woman he cheated on her with is the girl with dark glasses. If none of the characters in the novel can see her dark glasses, why should she be identified by them? I suppose the blindness has catapulted them into a such a different world that their names and former identities no longer apply, but it just didn’t seem relevant, especially since they are identified by aspects of their previous way of life.

I can’t say I was that enthralled with this novel, and that’s bad since I was really anticipating reading it. Perhaps my hopes were too high. I felt like an interesting idea for a plot was wasted by an over-rationalizing, third person narrative which diminished any suspense or emotion from me since it was all so thoroughly explained.

A Book of Common Prayer by Joan Didion

Joan Didion’s A Book of Common Prayer depicts a common trend that was seen throughout Central America throughout the 1970’s, 80’s, and in some cases, even today. To emphasize the commonality of the regimes and coups that took place, Didion sets her story in the imaginary Central American country of Boca Grande. However, the story of the political climate is connected to the forefront of the plot in two ways: the narrator, Grace, is an American expatriate living in Boca Grande and widowed by a member of the ruling family and brings the main character, Charlotte Douglas, to life by narrating her story, and also when the coup overthrows the ruling family and Charlotte dies in the overtaking. Everything in between describes Charlotte’s marriage to an abusive alcoholic and professor of literature (who would have thought?) and to a Berkeley California lawyer, as well as her daughter’s involvement with a Marxist organization and her second, practically still-born child. During her time in Boca Grande, Charlotte is present during many meetings having to do with the overthrow of the regime, but she acts oblivious to what is going on around her. Perhaps she wanted to feel connected to her daughter without acknowledging the violence that would result.

Didion, as always, depicts the reality of the times. By depicting an American woman in Boca Grande, she is able to do so of both the Central American and American cultures, ranging from corrupt government and regimes, to the American lifestyle on many different levels represented by Charlotte’s husbands and daughter. They are all embodied in Charlotte’s character.

Although I enjoyed reading this novel, Didion’s matter-of-fact style, which I admire greatly, is better suited for her essays. I find her to be an excellent verbal photographer of her times always gathering telling snapshots of the existing range of cultures.

The Blind Assassin - by Margaret Atwood

Reading The Blind Assassin after The God of Small Things was very complementary. Both novels with a similar plot set in different cultures (Canada and India respectively): a family is traced for three generations with the first generation starting a modest company which in the second generation is challenged by the communist movement that the owners are sympathetic towards but cannot sustain the demands, and it is in the third generation that things begin to differ, well that and Atwood’s writing is far superior and less superficial. Also, alongside the story told by a daughter of the third generation, Iris, is the enigmatic novel of the Blind Assassin written by one of the siblings of the third generation. So, essentially Atwood has granted us the gift of two novels in one. Of course, The Blind Assassin depicts a part of the narrator’s life that she does not feel comfortable explaining as fact in her life story, but implies only subtly. Even though the plots differ by the time we reach the third generation, there are some striking similarities: the issue of class and marriage and forbidden love interests.

Although the book is long it moves at a quick pace and is not stunted by overly descriptive writing as it is in Roy’s novel. The characters are believable even though their situation is unusual.

One theme that is gently weaved into the book, yet holds a strong presence is that of God and religion. My favorite quotation regarding the theme: “A paradox, the doughnut hole. Empty space, but now they’ve learned to market even that. A minus quantity; nothing, rendered edible. I wondered if they might be used – metaphorically, of course – to demonstrate the existence of God. Does naming a sphere of nothingness transmute it into being?” The belief in God shows up in different forms and varieties among the many characters in the novel. Iris, the narrator and the one responsible for the quotation above, obviously is not a believer. Her sister Laura is a believer in the essence of God; she does not allow the superficial aspects of organized religion to interfere with her behavior and acts in a way that is peculiarly honest. In a sense this makes her so pure and innocent that she is exempt from carrying any of the burdens of the family and they all fall on Iris. Reenie, a woman who looks after them and manages the house, although good at heart also believes in God, but in an institutional sense as well; she often cares about how certain behaviors appear to the community and gossips as many religious people do. However, Reenie is a moral character and a pillar for the two sisters.

The different forms of belief extend to other secondary and tertiary characters as well. I do think that the way each character decided to believe in God has an indirect impact on their fate since essentially it determines their outlook on life. Laura’s disappointments in human nature are earth shattering and drive her to suicide, Iris’s practical atheism is what makes her a perfect candidate for taking on the family’s burdens, and Reenie’s well-rounded approach to life results in a normal family, yet she does contradict her own “Christian morals” by becoming pregnant before wedlock.

Atwood has created an honest, intelligent, beautifully written, and entertaining novel. It’s a book for all lovers of literature!

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.

Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America by Barbara Ehrenreich

Over the years, a teacher that I once had and now have the pleasure of working with has repeatedly recommended this book to me. She explained that it is written by a woman who takes low-wage paying jobs in different States to come to a better understanding of how the poor scrape by through life. Although I thought it was a clever idea I didn’t jump at the opportunity to read this book until recently I thought, if she has recommended it to me so often, I’ll probably like it!

I did enjoy the read very much. For one, I find the subject relevant to today’s society. While her book is concerned with only three states: Florida, Maine and Minnesota there is a consistent pattern that I think extends beyond the U.S. and throughout the Western world (we all know that working conditions are far worse in some other regions). It is clear that Ehrenreich and I are on the same page on many social issues such as poverty, racism and rights in the work place. I found myself in full agreement with just about everything she says but I was also quite shocked at some of her observations, some jobs sounding like borderline slavery. Furthermore, it is really does help put the reader in the shoes of people who depend on such work for a living. Even if you pride yourself on being understanding towards those who serve you in restaurants, hotels, retail, etc. you still don’t know how much they go through and how rewarding a customer’s kindness can really be.

Generally, I’m more drawn to literary texts which is probably what kept me from reading this book. However, Ehrenreich’s voice reminded me a lot of Joan Didion’s, one of my favorite female writers. Both writers have a feminine voice but there is that sincerity which keeps the voice from becoming strictly feminine alienating male readers. Also, Ehrenreich takes on some pretty grimy jobs where some things she describes have no room for femininity. For example, she goes into detail about the different kinds of shit she had to clean off toilets as a cleaning lady in Maine.

If you are looking for a quick and interesting reading, maybe you want to take a break from all that heavy duty literary shit you often find yourself reading, this is a nice, intelligent break!

Herzog by Saul Bellow

Moses E Herzog, a character loosely based on Saul Bellow, has been divorced twice, fathered a child from each marriage and his career in academia is slowly diminishing when we meet him. This being the case, he is not altogether in a sound psychological and emotional state. To cope with his anger and frustrations he is writing mental letters to people with whom the nature of their relationships may vary from personal to professional, etc. The content of the letters is often triggered by different memories from Herzog’s past and we follow Herzog’s brain from letter to memory to letter to present and back again. In doing so, we are able to come to understand what has brought Herzog to this state and why he suffers as much as he does. By creating a narrative in such a style we see Herzog as a man mostly consumed by thoughts and ideas, not just having to do with intellectual matters, but personal matters of human behavior including his own.
Herzog is for the most part a kind, loving, trusting and loyal person. We see him continuously trusting people despite their betrayal of him over and over again. The main source of this betrayal is his coldly attractive second ex-wife Madeline. At the time we meet him, he is involved with another woman, who seems to be supportive, but he continuously is trying to escape her. Herzog has almost resigned himself to destruction by women by either avoiding the right women or hurting them and then binding himself to the nasty ones. Furthermore, he feels that his fate is sealed by his parents’ genes. He is always linking certain character traits of his own to those of his mother or father, often with a fatalistic approach, anticipating a tragic end.

At the climax of the story, Herzog tries to gain control by salvaging his relationship with his children as well as restoring a crumbling house in the middle of nowhere, Massachusetts. What we must decide is: is it too late for poor old Herzog?

The White-Luck Warrior - R. Scott Bakker

The sun glares. The air chills. The Mop tosses on and on, an endless ocean of swaying crowns. Whatever relief they hope to find in wind and sunlight is snuffed when they look to one another. Squinting. Eyes glittering from blackened faces. Ragged like beggars. In the gloom below, they seemed as true to their surroundings as the moss or the humus. Here on the heights, there is no overlooking either their straits or their desperation.

This book, and the series of which it is a part, falls easily into the category of world-building fantasy novels that pit evil forces against mankind, rife with battles, sex and court intrigue, sorcerers and gods and superhumans and non-human creatures both vile and sublime, and might easily be written off as one of the many Tor paperbacks that line the shelves of your local bookstore, the author's name stamped on a line of similarly designed covers. But what sets this series apart from other fantasy is the author's ambition. Embedded within the story is a philosophical core that is often absent in other books in the genre, one that guides not only many of the character's actions, but one that also seems to define the way that the world seems to move, the way that the story seems to unfold.


To summarize the plot would be tedious, but suffice it to say it is complicated, and has a novel structure in that narrative arcs are broken up into trilogies (so far). And despite Bakker's attempts to inject more seriousness into the genre, at times it seems the books take themselves too seriously, with the characters' conversations sometimes crossing the line into pedantry. The prose, which is far from terrible, at times becomes ponderous, as in the quotation above.

But the plot alone is worth plodding through the more tortuous sentence constructions, and the vision and the discipline evident in the execution of that vision are remarkable. It seems that Bakker has the whole story laid out in his mind, given the excellent pacing of the narratives in every story, as if each part is simply waiting for the book's bindings before it can be put on the shelf. For all its flaws, the story ranks high in the fantasy writing pantheon, even if it seems to fall short of the author's goals.

A Song of Ice and Fire (Series) - George R.R. Martin

This sprawling, epic, high-fantasy tale begins with A Game of Thrones, blooms into A Clash of Kings and A Storm of Swords, only to falter with the latest installment in the series, A Feast for Crows. There is a forthcoming release of the next installment in July, A Dance With Dragons, which, if the author is to be believed, will be followed by two more installments some time in the distant future. Despite each volume's size (they range from around 800 pages to 1200), they don't easily fit into the category of novels, as they are more book-length chapters in a larger work, akin to the novel-in-three-parts structure of The Lord of the Rings, the progenitor of the modern fantasy story. The reason for this is simple: None of the books contains a true narrative arc, and each one ends with the explicit suggestion of a cliffhanging TV drama's 'to be continued,' which says nothing about the quality of the series but suggests an admirable span of attention and intensity of ardor in those who love the genre.

The story is as simple as it is complex. A kingdom that has known peace for a decade faces both internal and external threats. As the power structure that keeps the kingdom together crumbles, a many-sided war breaks out in the resultant power vacuum, with long-simmering grudges and rivalries coming up to a boil, all while in the background twinned supernatural threats loom large. The complexity is introduced by means of the narrative structure, a first person limited accounting of events from the viewpoints of an ever-increasing cast of characters, and as the larger, world-encompassing events unfold, the reader is given long, uninterrupted views of the denizens of the world in their cups, in bed, in battle, and generally doing their best to survive in an uncertain and cruel world at war.

The quality of the prose in the books seems to suffer with each new installment, which isn't necessarily a barrier to enjoying the extant works as a whole, but by the third book a vicious editor would have been a godsend, and the fourth book could easily be cut in half--it seems like there are whole chapters that can be skipped over with impunity. But the first book is excellent in its economy of pacing of events and exposition, and by the time you've finished it you're either hooked on the plot or your not, so anyone who'd continue on with the series would understandably, much like the author, be more focused on the plot developments than the intricacies of how well a given passage might be written.

One aspect of the books that is extremely well done is the restraint with which Martin uses magic. Magic and the supernatural crop up rarely, but often enough to foster a sense of wonder and speculation, which ultimately buttresses the reader's interest in the characters, their stories, their ultimate fates, and, in some cases, their origins, which is, in the end, the reason why so many have read and now wait for the next installment, and will wait for the next one after that.

Julian by Gore Vidal

In this historical fiction novel, Vidal depicts the life of the Byzantine emperor, Julian. Although, most of the story is told through Julian’s own memoirs, Vidal includes two other points of view.


The novel begins with a correspondence between Priscus, an Athenian intellectual and Libanius, an intellectual at Daphne. What is revealed in this correspondence is a mutual desire to revive the mission Julian tried to accomplish throughout the Roman Empire: bring down Christianity and revive Hellenism. Priscus is in possession of both Julian’s memoirs and his journal and Libanius plans to revive Hellenism by making these public.

Julian’s memoir describes different events in his life, beginning with watching his father being taken for execution while Julian and his brother are sent away for schooling where the present emperor, Constantine (their cousin), can keep a watchful eye on them ensuring they don’t threaten his position on the throne. Julian’s appetite for knowledge and quest for truth was evident at a young age; he always questioned Christianity and eventually found truth in the Greek Gods. Of course he mentions his different relationships with friends, academics and lovers. The relationship that I found to be most interesting was the one he had with his brother, Gallus. The two were complete opposites; Julian admired his brother’s strength (but also shocked and disgusted by how he used it) while Gallus constantly put Julian down. Such a juxtaposition leads to some intense scenes.

The construction of the narrative weaves in the voices of Libanius and Priscus, particularly the latter, throughout Julian’s memoirs. Either through their correspondence or notes scribbled in the margins of Julian’s manuscript, their version of the story is also presented. Vidal also keeps their voices consistent and different from each other’s. At points it felt like reading actual historical documents rather than an historical novel. Furthermore, the different points of view provide a structure to the novel that motivates the reader to continue, even if he is well informed about the history of Julian.

Hypocrisy plays a heavy role in many different aspects, the most obvious one being the role the Orthodox Church played in Byzantine society which is what led to Julian’s rejection of it at a young age. The following quote shows him taking action towards this corrupt bunch as emperor,

“Yet your religion preaches that you should not resist injury or go to law or even hold property, much less steal it! You have been taught to consider nothing your own, except your place in the other and better world. Yet you wear jewels, rich robes, build huge basilicas, all in this world, not the next. You were taught to despise money, yet you amass it,” (pg 336).

But even Julian, whose hypocrisies were not as blatant and reckless, made certain unethical decisions to further his own cause, such as letting his soldiers capture and rape women to keep their morale up or allowing the execution of an innocent man to maintain good relations with the senators (I think). There were even points where he compared his decision making to his hated cousin, Constantius, the emperor before him.

Priscus and Libanius also reveal some hypocrisies of their own. In their correspondence Libanius keeps a cheerful tone, even praising him at times, while he notes in the margin of Julian’s memoir “I hate Priscus”. Furthermore, Priscus presents himself as an honest person, he is even forward about his own hypocrisies. However, he scams Libanius for the documents of Julian! This makes the characters all very real and addresses the issue of everyone’s individual hypocrisies, yet, as an institution the hypocrisies become much more harmful and sickening. Despite some of Julian’s decisions he truly did try to eradicate the hypocrisies of both the palace and the church.

Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

"It is only your guest, sir," I called out, desirous to spare him the humiliation of exposing his cowardice further. "I had the misfortune to scream in my sleep, owing to a frightful nightmare. I'm sorry I disturbed you."
-pg 33

An odd book, made odder still by its uncanniness, that unheimlich so well explained by Freud's exegesis of E.T.A. Hoffman's story The Sandman. For it's a familiar story, familiarly told, love unrequited followed by revenge, told through the eyes of a more or less passive observer to a passive listener, describing events that are so beyond the ken of normal life as to seem mythical, taken to such extremes as to be pure fantasy. There is something of fable about it, some Grimm unlogic to the lives, loves, motivations, and hatreds of the characters, that their actions, so far removed from what one would normally expect of the Victorian English, lose their unreality and seem to become etched in stone, like the lives of heroes and villains from some bygone age where, as in the Old Testament or Shakespeare, people know what it is to sin, and know well how to hate.

Mr. Lockwood, the man to whom the story of Heathcliff's revenge is told, seems to sum it up in the quotation above: The story is a nightmare which we, the readers and the listener, have entered into; the strange doublings, the two seemingly isolated estates, the many repetitions of names, and the surly demon around which it all revolves are the product of a sentient but troubled mind, and there is no moral purpose which guides them all, just dreamy developments that compound horror and outrage; to wake up would be a relief, but we're forced to move on by that same sadistic interest that draws people to bullfights, or, more apt, perhaps, car accidents and tragedies, auto-da-fes, perp walks, and other public, if less lethal, yet more lasting humiliations.

But to say it's a nightmare does not quite grasp the horrific fascination that I felt while reading the book. Instead, it might be better to say that it convinces you in some manner beyond belief that these characters are real, and terrible to behold, and if the characters are plagued by ghostly visitations and vengeful lives and loves from beyond the grave, leering up from the moist warm earth, scratching at windows, infiltrating dreams, then the characters themselves are ghosts set loose by Emile Bronte's awful imagination, and sent, as ghosts are, to trouble your waking life, not your dreams.

Bleak House - Charles Dickens

Not only is it a still night on dusty high roads and on hill-summits, whence a wide expanse of country may be seen in repose, quieter and quieter as it spreads away into a fringe of trees against the sky with the grey ghost of a bloom upon them; not only is it a still night in gardens and in woods, and on the river where the water-meadows are fresh and green, and the stream sparkles on among pleasant islands, murmuring weirs, and whispering rushes; not only does the stillness attend it as it flows where the houses cluster thick, where many bridges are reflected in it, where wharves and shipping make it black and awful, where it winds from these disfigurements through marshes whose grim beacons stand like skeletons washed ashore, where it expands through the bolder region of rising grounds, rich in cornfield wind-mill and steeple, and where it mingles with the ever-heaving sea; not only is it a still night on the deep, and on the shore where the watchers stands to see the ship with her spread wings cross the path of light that appears to be presented only to him; but even on this stranger's wilderness of London there is some rest.
pg. 668

The geography of this sentence seems to cover all; we begin on a high hill with a grand view of the surrounding land, behold the river and effortlessly follow its meandering path down to the sea, stop briefly to consider the distant deep, only to be arrested by the vision of a boat coming into a harbor beaconed in by a lighthouse's light, and then come back to rest in the middle of the city of London. At the beginning, it seems the night is the subject; then, the stillness of that night; and by the end of the sentence we discover what we've known all along, that sound is the paragraph's main concern, building up to what will be the crescendo of the passage, where "every noise is merged, this moonlight night, into a distant ringing hum, as if the city were a vast glass, vibrating."

And what is that sound? The noise of life? And why not, after all, characterize it that way? Dickens ranges both high and low to give a full portrait of London society, from street sweepers to Baronets, and weaves together every character's fate in a way that suggests that despite their differences, they all are part of the same entity, this vast vibrating glass, the consciousness contained within the muddy, foggy, wet, dispiriting city of London.

The novel is anchored by an ongoing case in the English courts of equity, Jarndyce vs. Jarndyce, which has gone on for so long with so little progress that the original claimants are long dead and it is their various descendants who stand to reap a reward from its successful resolution, despite the fact that the case is nowhere near its conclusion. In the end, the case is a joke, Dickens's damnation of the entire court, but it serves to draw all the main characters into a common orbit, just as the city does, and there might be a statement inherent in their juxtaposition, where both are foggy, muddy entities around which the huddled masses gather to look for some meaning, the courts seem populated with dust, decay, and a grinding forth of the lowest form of existence--there are no people there, just lawyers, judges, claimants, and cases--whereas the city in contrast seems to sing with sympathetic life, for all the mean tragedies and awful loves won and lost, it is still a wondrously alive thing.

Another Country by James Baldwin

"The silence of the listeners became strict with abruptly focused attention, cigarettes were unlit, and drinks stayed on the tables; and in all of the faces, even the most ruined and most dull, a curious, wary light appeared. They were being assaulted by the saxophonist who perhaps no longer wanted their love and merely hurled his outrage at them with the same contemptuous, pagan pride with which he humped the air. And yet the question was terrible and real; the boy was blowing with his lungs and guts out of his own short past; somewhere in that past, in the gutters or gang fights or gang shags; in the acrid room, on the sperm-stiffened blanket, behind marijuana or the needle, under the smell of piss in the precinct basement, he had received the blow from which he never would recover and this no one wanted to believe. Do you love me? Do you love me? Do you love me?"

The title of Baldwin's book unintentionally captures what it is like to read it in 2011, so many decades after its first publication. Set in the years following World War II, the New York presented here feels like another universe. It is a place where a black man lives in fear of the cop on the corner, making every street a terrifying gauntlet. Mixed-race couples are confronted with scorn and revulsion in the faces they pass in Washington Square Park. A corned beef sandwich and a beer can buy you a young homeless man for the night, if you're lonely. After last call, in the city's shadowy spaces, patrons from the gay bar and the longshoreman bar meet in violent embrace, even though they would never acknowledge each other in the harsh light of day. Young couples live in cramped apartments, nothing more than cages where they claw at each other. Aging bohemians haunt the same haunts of their youth, clinging to the same stale dreams, and endlessly repeating the same stale ideas on how to live.

Above all it is a place where everyone, everywhere, is searching for love. And yet they hate themselves so much that all they can do is unleash their hate on those closest to them. This self-hate, which perpetuates a destructive Oresteia-like cycle, stems from the mere fact that they're black, or gay, or white even, a reminder that racism and prejudice poison both the oppressed and the oppressor.

Of course, some of these aspects of New York life are eternal; others, particularly those concerning the lives of blacks, I'm not in a position to say, and the news gives reasons for equal measures of optimism and pessimism. It would be comforting to think that things have changed, that we hate ourselves less, or at least for reasons that are less arbitrary. Yet Baldwin's vision of New York is so convincingly miserable, and at times so depressingly familiar, that I often wondered what I was doing here myself.

Another Country, as you can probably tell, is a brutal book, and brutally told, with the blunt force of the saxophonist described above, thrusting all his rage, all that is terrible and real, on an awestruck and uncomfortable audience. I suppose the question is whether that brutality serves some purpose in the end, whether in some twisted way such trials make for a better person, or a better nation as a whole. Perhaps by recounting the effects of society's sins, Baldwin is suggesting that some sacrifice has been made by his suffering characters, offering those who survive a chance to redeem all of history. It is an open-ended question whether redemption is possible for the characters in the book, who only rarely, if ever, rise above the maelstrom of their time and see a way to move forward. More worryingly, it remains an open-ended question for the contemporary reader too.

Slow Man by J.M. Coetzee

"The blow catches him from the right, sharp and surprising and painful, like a bolt of electricity, lifting him up off the bicycle. Relax! he tells himself as he flies through the air (flies through the air with the greatest of ease!), and indeed he can feel his limbs go obediently slack. Like a cat he tells himself: roll, then spring to your feet, ready for what comes next. The unusual word limber or limbre is on the horizon too.

"That is not quite as it turns out, however. Whether because his legs disobey or because he is for a moment stunned (he hears rather than feels the impact of his skull on the bitumen, distant, wooden, like a mallet-blow), he does not spring to his feet at all, but on the contrary slides metre after metre, on and on, until he is quite lulled by the sliding.

"He lies stretched out, at peace. It is a glorious morning. The sun's touch is kind. There are worse things than letting oneself go slack, waiting for one's strength to return. In fact there might be worse things than having a quick nap. He closes his eyes; the world tilts beneath him, rotates; he goes absent."

So begins Slow Man, a book that I will press on everyone I know. These first three paragraphs are a good representation of the book's style. It is formal yet playful, austere yet warm. Each word pulls its own weight, and it's as if they are being used for the first time, presented afresh in all their wondrous glory.

The man in the accident is Paul Rayment, an elderly, bookish, solitary type. He finds himself in the hospital, at the mercy of a young, efficient surgeon who amputates his leg. He is discharged, and left to fend for himself in his lonely apartment. He goes to physical therapy sessions, hires a nurse, but it doesn't stop the gloom from settling in. He is a cripple; his life as he knew it is over.

A new nurse comes into his life, an immigrant from Croatia. He discovers that he is falling in love with her, and the gloom begins to lift. This part of the book is heart-wrenching -- I must have been quite a sight on the subway, literally wincing with pain, and every so often slamming the covers shut. There were many sharp intakes of breath and whispered pleas to the main character. I also found myself laughing out loud (which never fails to irritate me when other people on the subway do it), a welcome novelty for a Coetzee book.

And then, about one-third of the way through, someone new appears on Paul's doorstep: Elizabeth Costello. Yes, Elizabeth Costello, the titular character of another Coetzee book, who, if the rumors swirling among Coetzee watchers are to be believed, could possibly be the alter ego of the great man himself. Costello, a renowned writer, impishly inserts herself into Paul's affairs. It turns out that she may or may not be the author of all that is happening, and may or may not be in total control of her characters, a la At Swim-Two-Birds.

My reaction to this development was swift and unequivocal: What have you done? No one wants to play your stupid postmodern games! Give me back the touching story of the crippled, solitary man who finds love in the autumn of his life! We hates Elizabeth Costello, we wants our precious!

Etc. But it turns out that the games are a great deal of fun. And the book remains, to the end, utterly gripping.

Howards End by E.M. Forster

"'Somehow, when that kind of man looks frightened it is too awful. It is all right for us to be frightened, or for men of another sort--Father, for instance; but men like that! When I saw all the others so placid, and Paul mad with terror in case I said the wrong thing, I felt for a moment that the whole Wilcox family was a fraud, just a wall of newspapers and motor-cars and golf-clubs, and that if it fell I should find nothing behind it but panic and emptiness.'"

At first glance, it would seem that Forster's Howards End, the story of two English families at the turn of the twentieth century, bears little resemblance to A Passage to India, a later work set in India during the height of Britain's colonial supremacy. The latter, while tenderly exploring the lives of its characters, is set against a backdrop of epochal events, and the entanglements that arise between Englishman and Indian are the ripple-like repercussions of a broader clash of civilizations. Howards End, on the other hand, describes a clash of a much smaller scale: that between the upper-middle class and the middle-middle class.

Typically English! you might cry. So inexplicably obsessed with the fine gradations of class! But while Howards End is concerned with quintessentially English dilemmas, and is more humble in historical and geographic scope, it bears similarities to its worldly successor. It is perhaps even more disturbing, suggesting that the fathomless mystery of the other can reveal itself not only in far-flung places, but right next door, amongst one's countrymen.

Howards End is the name of a house, and serves as a symbol of England as a whole. The claim to this property becomes a contest between the practical-minded and business-sound Wilcoxes and the idealistic and art-obsessed Schlegels. The Wilcoxes have their hands on "all the ropes" of the material world; the Schlegels a deep dedication to the more nebulous world of human relationships. In their dealings with each other, as well as with the pitiable clerk Leonard Bast (a representative of the lower-middle class), we see the hypocrisies and strengths of the warring clans. As Virgina Woolf puts it, the story is a "struggle between the things that matter and the things that do not matter, between reality and sham, between the truth and the lie." Forster accomplishes this all with humor, keen observation and great feeling.

Beneath it all is the terror that comes from gaining a glimpse of another's life. It is a threat to the fortresses we make of our beliefs; it is the shaking of the earth under one's feet. The most famous scene in Passage to India occurs at the Marabar Caves, where Mrs. Moore, new to the country, hears a disconcerting echo in one of the caves. It is a sound that is beyond language, beyond understanding; to her it sounds like "boum." What this "boum" means remains vague, but we know it shatters the foundation upon which she has built her life, a foundation that began to crack when she came into contact with an alien culture. Reading Howards End, perhaps we can put words to that sound: panic and emptiness, panic and emptiness.

The Leopard by Guiseppe di Lampedusa

"Don Fabrizio grew calm again; his nephew was looking at him with the affectionate irony which youth accords to age. 'They can allow themselves to be a bit nice to us, as they're so sure to be free of us the day of our funerals.' He went with Tancredi to look at the 'foreign peaches.' The graft with German cuttings, made two years ago, had succeeded perfectly; there was not much fruit, a dozen or so, on the two grafted trees, but it was big, velvety, luscious-looking; yellowish, with a faint flush of rosy pink on the cheeks, like those of Chinese girls. The Prince gave them a gentle squeeze with his delicate fleshy fingers."

Lampedusa's book is like those peaches: ripe, heavy, soaked in the Sicilian sun. Each scene is densely sensual, as if you can almost touch the baroque drawing rooms he describes, the strawberry lips of a raven-haired beauty, the gleaming knobs of a golden telescope, the white cakes studded with green pistachios. It is a past world brought richly, almost decadently, to life; but it is also a world that is everywhere tinged with an impending sense of loss.

The Leopard begins in May 1860 during the Risorgimento, a movement that sought to unify the states of Italy in a single nation. The plot focuses on the Salinas, an aristocratic family led by Don Fabrizio. He is described as being "very large and strong; in houses inhabited by common mortals his head would touch the lowest rosette on the chandeliers; his fingers could twist a ducat coin as if it were mere paper; and there was a constant coming and going between Villa Salina and a silversmith's for the mending of forks and spoons which, in some fit of controlled rage at table, he had coiled into a hoop."

Don Fabrizio is the unchallenged master of his domain, but knows that his power is ebbing with the sweeping changes unleashed by the Risorgimento. He sees it most keenly in the engagement of his nephew, Tancredi, the scion of a prestigious yet bankrupt noble clan, to a woman whose father, Don Calogero, has used the new levers of power to become a wealthy landowner. The engagement is one of the many compromises Don Fabrizio makes to ensure the survival of his way of life, even while acknowledging that this steady dilution will also seal its doom. As Tancredi says to him, "If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change."

Don Calogero is emblematic of the new world order: crass, unsophisticated, obsessed with money. He cannot appreciate an old ballroom the way only a consummate noble like Don Fabrizio can: "It was not the flashy gilding which decorators slap on nowadays, but a faded gold, pale as the hair of Nordic children, determinedly hiding its value under a muted use of precious material intended to let beauty be seen and cost forgotten."

When The Leopard was first published (posthumously; it was famously rejected by several publishers during Lampedusa's lifetime) in 1958, it apparently caused a great stir in Italian political circles. One can easily see why this paean to aristocracy would rile more democratic-minded folk, especially those whose ancestors shed blood to shepherd Italy into the modern era. This might be a case in which an outsider's perspective proves valuable. With no emotional attachment to Italian history, we can see that The Leopard is not so much about politics or class warfare; it is an elegy for a world that, for all its imperfections, is now extinct, and a recognition that our own world would be the poorer if we forgot it once existed.

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Volume One by William Shirer

"One of the few instructors Hitler seems to have liked was Professor Theodor Gissinger, who strove to teach him science. Gissinger later recalled, 'As far as I was concerned, Hitler left neither a favorable nor an unfavorable impression in Linz. He was by no means a leader of the class. He was slender and erect, his face pallid and very thin, almost like that of a consumptive, his gaze unusually open, his eyes brilliant.'"

Volume One of Shirer's classic history of Nazi Germany recounts the life and times of a young Adolf Hitler; the birth of the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP) amidst the political chaos, economic ruin, and national humiliation that befell Germany following World War I; the almost-comical failure of Hitler's first power grab, the Munich Beer Hall Putsch, and his subsequent trial and imprisonment; and a brief overview of German history and intellectual thought, which not only had a direct impact on Hitler's famous Weltanschauung (or "worldview"), but in Shirer's opinion also made Germany a fertile ground for Hitler's ideas.

Shirer's book is immensely readable and full of fascinating tidbits. For example, I wasn't aware that Hitler's original title for Mein Kampf, which he began writing in prison, was Four and a Half Years of Struggle Against Lies, Stupidity and Cowardice. It is a revealing anecdote: the crudeness of the title betrays a lack of formal education, while the juxtaposition of himself against a mentally inferior and dishonorable world smacks of megalomania. Mein Kampf itself, quoted at length by Shirer, is similarly instructive, with its deranged theories on the Aryan master race, ultra-nationalism, syphilis (yes, syphilis), and Lebensraum, which means "living space." (Hitler thought it vitally necessary to have much more of it, which explains some of his later expansionist policies.)

If only we could write off Hitler as a mere crackpot! If only he had remained the young bohemian in Vienna who went everywhere in a shabby black overcoat, with no money, no job, and no talent to become the artist he so badly wanted to be. If only the NSDAP had remained the tiny German Workers' Party, one of the hundreds of political clubs that were all the rage during the Weimar Republic, many of which turned out to be as harmless as the rock bands now proliferating in Williamsburg. The group was led by the failed painter Hitler, a locksmith, a drunken poet, an ex-soldier, and a self-described economist who had written tracts railing against "interest-rate slavery."

But this pitiful band of losers created Nazism, the great scourge of Europe. And this is why even as we learn of Hitler's humble origins, and recognize his naive dreams of artistic glory, he never emerges as a man of flesh and blood. He remains a demon obscured by his aura of evil, as well as one of those phenomenal forces of the human race that have appeared only half a dozen times throughout history. Hitler had a mother, just like the rest of us, but somehow I don't believe it.

As you read passages of Mein Kampf, it is hard not to be impressed by his unquenchable thirst for power. Even as a young man, he saw himself as the creative political genius who would become lord of the earth, and restore Germany to greatness. He was the one man chosen by Providence who "with apodictic force will form granite principles from the wavering idea-world of the broad masses...until from the shifting waves of a free-thought world there will arise a brazen cliff of solid unity in faith and will." In this day and age, when so many regimes couch their totalitarian intentions in Orwellian double-speak, it is perversely refreshing to read a straight-up call for dictatorship, and mercilessly violent means of attaining it. How the rest of Germany embraced Hitler's Weltanschauung, and how the world came to know of it, is a story for later volumes.

Locos - Felipe Alfau

One must bear in mind that these people are creating their own life and standards, and are still novices at the game. In other words, the reader is expected to sit back and watch this procession of strange people and distorted phenomena without even a critical eye. To look for anything else, or to take seriously this bevy of irresponsible puppets and the inconsistency of the author, would not be advisable, as by doing so and imagining things that might lend themselves to misinterpretation, the reader would only disclose, beneath a more or less entertaining comedy of meaningless gestures, the vulgar aspects of a common tragedy.

Let us, then, take the author at his word, and consider this book of stories without even a critical eye, treat it as an amusement akin to watching a TV show of which you are not particularly fond, heedlessly dipping into a narrative arc of which you are unaware, considering each episode as a self-contained thing, the characters and the events imprisoned within the small portion of time that you bestow upon each story your disinterested attention. So, one day, you might read the story of a professional beggar, who goes out each day dressed in his uniform of rags, only to come home at night not to some hovel on the street, but a well-appointed apartment in a luxury apartment building. On another day you might read the story of a fingerprint expert, who is so convinced that fingerprints don't lie, that he allows himself to be put in prison for a murder he did not commit, simply because his fingerprints were found at the scene of the crime. Or on another day you might read the story of the woman who is so obsessed with death that she dies each year for a month or two at a time, only to rise again, until her obsession threatens to leave her dead for more time than she is alive, so she must attempt to commit suicide to cure herself of her obsession. There are eight such stories, each with its own quirky premise, each with strange twists of narrative, each with characters, as the title suggests, who are crazy. And as Alfau asserts, each story can be read alone and not in relation to the others that are told. Careless reading is the preferred mode of consumption. If you read the book in this way, the stories are entertaining, original in their conception and amusing in execution, a warm entertainment for some cold and lonely evening, bed time stories perfect for passing the time before sleep. In other words, light reading.

But, then, should you take such disclaimers seriously? It recalls Montaigne's blithe ironic pose: "...and there is no reason why you should waste your leisure on so frivolous and unrewarding a subject." Alfau admits that there is some method to the book's madness, and that the "pages have been numbered clearly and the stories arranged less clearly in a conventional order" which he finds more or less appropriate. So what is the reader to make of the fact that the stories tend to share the same characters, that they each reference a shared pool of events, that there is a tenuous thread that seems to connect each of the narratives? Most curious of all, though, is the author's presence in every story, his insistence on the distinction between real people and the characters he sets in motion, his frequent protestations that he is not to blame for his characters' actions. He admits in the prologue that he has completely lost control. All of this seems to beg for a more careful reading of the book, an attempt to get at what, exactly, he means by the common tragedy that underlies this comedy of gestures.

Complications set in immediately. If you step back and try to consider the work as a whole, attempt to see the novel that is constructed of these eight stories and the curious prologue, the impression made is one of a mound of pieces from several disparate puzzles. Nothing fits. Characters shift. Time, seemingly, does not exist. In one story a woman named Lunarito is a murderer, in another she is the victim of some murder. In one story a poet named Garcia is a crass and opportunistic young man, in another, in the same time period, he is an unhappy and sensitive child. One character actively takes over the telling of one of the stories and becomes confused, wondering whether he is a real being or some fictional entity, and despairs when he comes to the conclusion that he is neither. In another, a real person seeks to become more real by becoming a character in a story. There is a curious logic at work, a vague understanding on the part of the reader that although nothing seems to make sense, there is a key just waiting to be found. But as you, the ambitious reader, try to sort and sift the puzzle pieces, and unlock this curious jewelry box of a novel, just as you think you discover a key to the lock, the lock disappears. It is not dream-like, though it shares that uneasiness of purpose that dreams seem to embody. It is not a mystery, although you feel like a detective tracking down leads, establishing alibis, positing schemes.

Ultimately, it seems the tragedy Alfau refers to is one of creating stories, of crafting coherent tales, but that statement seems to miss the mark in so many ways. It is not a story about stories, it is not a novel about writing. In the end, in much the same way that At Swim-Two-Birds, the Flann O'Brien novel in which characters band together and plot against their author, it is an amusing tale of the richness of the imagination. And even that sentiment, in the face of this wonderful book, seems to fall flat.

The Nobility of Failure: Tragic Heroes in the History of Japan by Ivan Morris

"It is essential that the hero be prepared for this sublime end so that when the moment comes he will know precisely how to act and not be swayed by his instinct for survival or other human weakness. His final, blazing meeting with his fate is the most important event of his life. To continue fighting against all odds and to acquit himself properly at the end will give validity to his previous efforts and sacrifices; to die badly will make a mockery of everything that has lent meaning to his existence. 'Think constantly of your death!' were the last words that the loyalist hero, Masahige, is said to have spoken to his son before committing harakiri in 1336..."

The notion that one must die well is not confined to the Japanese. Montaigne once wrote that "all the other actions of our life ought to be tried and tested by this last act. It is the master-day, it is the day that is judge of all the rest..." But no country on earth has absorbed this notion so deeply as Japan, whose obsession with the art of dying has become as familiar as the words harakiri and kamikaze. And while Montaigne imbues death with a life-affirming humanism, seeing in it an opportunity to "speak plain" and to show what is "good and clean in the bottom of the pot," the traditional Japanese concept of death, with its perverse focus on suicide, can be so impassioned that it verges on religious ecstasy. As Morris writes: "Hagakure, the most influential of all samurai treatises ever written, combines the characters for 'dying' (shini) and 'going mad' (kurui) into a single word, shinigurui ('death frenzy'), and enjoins this ardent state on the warrior; for he cannot hope to accomplish any great deed until he has first 'surmounted himself' by discarding the cautious dictates of reason and self-interest."

Death, the ultimate failure, is the focus of Morris's book. He recounts the tales of nine of Japan's greatest heroes, each of which is used as a lens to view historical periods stretching from the fourth century to the nineteenth. (There is also a final chapter discussing kamikaze pilots, who drew much of their inspiration from these legendary figures.) Their stories are strikingly similar: they experienced a meteoric rise in fame and influence before dying a glorious death in the face of certain defeat, which invariably came at the hands of those in positions of power. Furthermore, whatever agendas these heroes championed, whichever side they chose, were brutally crushed by their enemies in martyrdom's aftermath. In fact, as Morris shows, their deaths often hastened the destruction of their causes, and redounded to the immense benefit of their oppressors, who went on to do the less romantic business of ruling Japan.

For the most part, the men who ended feudalism and established the military government of the shogunate, who later transformed Japan into a world power during the Meiji Restoration, who engineered all the major changes that would define Japan's historical course -- these are the country's villains. The heroes are the ones who died in futile gestures, attached themselves to lost causes, and were on the wrong side of history from the very beginning. If it were to play out this way in America, there would now be national holidays on General Lee's birthday, and a widespread disdain for that worldly striver, Abraham Lincoln.

What could explain this reverence for total failure? What does it say about the Japanese psyche? Morris, often citing the writings of the heroes themselves, many of whom had a penchant for poetry, highlights certain hallmarks of the Japanese hero. He is, above all, a man of sincerity, so wedded to his beliefs that he cannot deign to take the practical measures and compromises that will offer him a chance of success. He obeys only the impulses that stem from his deepest emotions, which makes him appear irrational and rash to the outside world. He recognizes the ephemeral nature of human life, which, like the iconic cherry blossom, blooms vividly just before its petals are scattered to the wind. And it is through death, particularly suicide, that the hero expresses his purity of intention, and his rejection of the debasing machinations of the material world.

It is, at first glance, a worldview that is horribly nihilistic. What would Montaigne, the probing rationalist of his inner life, say to this sweeping dismissal of human experience? But as you read Morris's book, it becomes less perverse, more human, and almost poignant. The strongest chapter in the book deals with the kamikaze pilots, who eagerly volunteer to sacrifice their lives even though they know that the war is lost, and that their flimsy aircraft will do nothing more than plop in the ocean. They write farewell letters to their parents, and drop in the envelopes fingernail parings and locks of hair -- all that will remain for their burial. The devout fealty expressed in these letters, as well as the intense gratitude they feel toward their parents, sheds a more noble light on the Japanese consciousness and its relation to the outer world. As one ardent suicide bomber puts it:

"You attach too much importance to life. Imagine that the whole world were to disappear except for you. Would you really want to go on living? If a human life has any important meaning, it is because of some relationship with other human beings. From this springs the principle of honour. Life rests on this idea, as exemplified by the conduct of our ancient samurai...who consciously devote their lives to serving something outside themselves."

The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene

"Scobie thought: what are those others worth that they have the nerve to sneer at any human being? He knew every one of her faults. How often he had winced at her patronage of strangers. He knew each phrase, each intonation that alienated others. Sometimes he longed to warn her -- don't wear that dress, don't say that again, as a mother might teach a daughter, but he had to remain silent, aching with the foreknowledge of her loss of friends. The worst was when he detected in his colleagues an extra warmth of friendliness towards himself, as though they pitied him. What right have you, he longed to exclaim, to criticize her? This is my doing. This is what I've made of her. She wasn't always like this."

The Heart of the Matter is set in a West African town by the ocean, during World War II. The town is occupied by the British, but there are Indians and Syrians there, too, as well as the natives -- it is the original Tower of Babel in the words of one character. The British authorities are primarily occupied with the ships that come to port, searching each to prevent the smuggling of diamonds to Axis forces. A precarious sense of order prevails during the day, as the book's main character, the policeman Scobie, tends to both war-related matters and local law enforcement. But underneath the blank smiling face of a native (or an Englishman) stirs something sinister, which emerges under the cover of darkness in the form of illicit transactions, plots of intrigue, and bloody crimes committed on the wharf.

We are, of course, not only in West Africa, but the familiar territory of Graham Greene. And, true to form, the town is not just a far-flung colonial outpost, but the battlefield of a man's soul. The Nazis, the diamond smuggling, a war that killed millions -- these serve as a background for Scobie's struggle, which stems from that most commonplace of difficulties: an unhappy marriage.

Scobie is a good man. He does not lie, he does not cheat, and he strives to do the least amount of harm. He is, like Greene, a converted Catholic. Like any good man with a modicum of power he is weighed down by a sense of responsibility, for the orderly upkeep of the town, the well-being of his servants, and, above all, the happiness of his poor, suffering wife, the object of mockery described in the passage above. And, like any good Catholic, he blames himself for her misery, for keeping her in this stifling town for fifteen long years, amidst fatuous expatriates who are determined to preserve the etiquette of the clubs and boarding schools of their homeland.

Scobie's crisis begins when he falls for another woman, a young widow whom he pities as much as his wife. This sets off a series of events in which the good man, little by little, succumbs to the evil that is everywhere around him, and to which so far he has been immune. It is an old story, but what sets this one apart is the cause of Scobie's downfall, which is not the classic temptation of sin, but Scobie's drive to be good. It is the religion he makes of his wife, who embodies his vow to be a better man, and the sin for which he must atone. But she does not want his sacrifice, and yearns to escape his overbearing pity, which mirrors the conundrum that Scobie himself confronts as he grapples with God: who, in the end, shoulders the cross? The one martyred, or the one for whom the sacrifice was made?

The Rabbi of Lud - Stanley Elkin

As a rabbi, I'm a sucker for jargon, the sense it gives of community, solidarity. Or I might have been touched by my own, or all our distance perhaps. I was a long way from far-off New Jersey and I had a sense that they were even farther than I was. They were telling each other (and themselves, too, I thought) of their areas of expertise, throwing around the names of the various equipment they were checked out in, the rigs they were qualified to drive, the lengths of the fuses they were permitted to light, the tonnages they were ordained to bring down with dynamite, the acetylene power they were certified to spark, speaking of all their graduated tolerances as of recently inspected elevators, their earned sufferance and lenities--all their official documented powers and strong suits, gifted in trowelers and dozers and yard loaders, the teamsters' knacks, the oilers' and operators' known ropes, their competencies and aptitudes, métiers and flairs, green-fingered in black top and carpentry and all the alchemies of poured cement. Yet a curious, even cynical subtext underlay their conversation. Much was bluff and some implied consent that it was all right to bluff. It had to do with the nature of the enterprise, as though they were enlisted men in furious us/them contention with Authority.
-pg 98

 As a writer, Stanley Elkin's a sucker for jargon, for the vocabulary of vocation, all the catchphrases and customary utterances that are found in every profession, be it disc-jockeying, franchising, shit-shoveling, God-fearing, or, in this case, this book's particular obsession, the burying of Jewish dead. The speaker in the above passage is Jerry Goldkorn, the puppet through which Elkin's voice moves like that first, animating Word, the not-rabbi rabbi of the not-town of Lud, a community buried in a vast Jewish graveyard in New Jersey, which consists primarily of an ever-growing population of dead people and the few residents and businesses required to service the needs of the recently deceased. As far as being a rabbi goes, Goldkorn is sub-par, his calling to the service of God more an accident than some conscious decision; his Hebrew is so bad, his grasp of ritual and custom so tenuous, that to become ordained he was forced to go to an offshore yeshiva on a small atoll in the Maldives. The plot, such as it is, centers around Goldkorn's insistence on living in Lud and his daughter Connie's insistence that they leave. He likes the life; it's easy, he makes decent money, he has few responsibilities. She hates the life; she has no friends, the surrounding grave haunt her dreams. When she demands that the family leave the place and Goldkorn insists that they stay, Connie fabricates a silly story that rocks the community with outrage, and then she runs away. The Rabbi of Lud then enters a crisis of his curious, failed faith, examines his motivations for shying away from the world in a city of graves, and, in the end, the family, once again reunited, decides to stay.

There isn't much about the story that moves, per se. In this, it is perhaps one of Elkin's weakest books. All of his stories are animated by his distinctive voice; in the weaker ones every character seems infected by the mind of Stanley Elkin--they all speak the same way. For lovers of dramatic arc and emotional denouement, probably fifty percent of his books will rub them the wrong way. But that voice! It deserves reverence; listening to it as it infects your inner ear, like some virus, like, as in The Living End, the sweet impregnating song of God, is like entering a mind that has a vocabulary that multiplies the reader's by fifty times. And sometimes it's enough. But here, as in some of his other books, it's not. Despite the fact that Elkin has produced books moved solely by language and succeeded, where gimmicks and gags are piled up and pushed forward by an engine of stellar prose, some of his books end up as failures, too. The failures end up leaving the reader flat, wondering what, after the laughs, after all the fun, the point of it all was; whereas the successes leave the reader agog at the possibilities of language, how it can create and sustain a convincingly absurd world and deliver a hefty dose of pathos in the process. George Mills, perhaps his best book, which shares many of the themes of The Rabbi of Lud (and some some similarities of structure), is an example of a much better story, chock full with gags and gimmicks and wildly inventive narrative twists and turns, and it also has the benefit of having a level of language that is rarely equaled and perhaps never surpassed. This book, in comparison, seems a second-rate effort. But, keep in mind, second rate for someone who is undeniably a master.

Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner

"...and down there in the stable a hollow square of faces in the lantern light, the white faces on three sides, the black ones on the fourth, and in the center two of his wild negroes fighting, naked, fighting not like white men fight, with rules and weapons, but like negroes fight to hurt one another quick and bad."

The story of Thomas Sutpen, who one day in 1833 appears in Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, "on a big hard-ridden roan horse, man and beast looking as though they had been created out of thin air and set down in the bright summer sabbath sunshine"; who by mysterious means secures from an Indian the best land in the county, and proceeds with unflagging fury, with the assistance of a pack of wild slaves clothed in nothing but caked mud, to construct the grim mansion that serves as the centerpiece of the plantation known as Sutpen's Hundred; who by the same indomitable will wins the hand of Ellen Coldfield, with whom he has a son, Henry, and a daughter, Judith; and who, by carrying and disseminating the sin of slavery, wreaks destruction on his family and himself, and curses the descendants of Yoknapatawpha.

Sutpen's motivation, the reason behind his unflagging fury, is one of the great mysteries of the novel. The story's narrators, perpetually astonished, and perhaps not unlike Faulkner himself, are driven by one question: Why? It is one of Absalom's greatest literary legacies, how the legend of Sutpen is invented and reinvented by different narrators as they strive to find that kernel of truth which will explain the inexplicable. And it is not only the tale of Sutpen that is told and retold, but that of Judith and Henry; Ellen and her sister Rosa; Sutpen's half-black child Clytie; and Charles Bon, the young man from New Orleans who has a mind to marry Judith. By telling their stories over and again, in circular iterations, Faulkner is not merely trying to achieve a Rashomon-like effect of different perspectives. Rather, his characters become as large as an Agamemnon or Persephone, mythic figures who cast their shadow over all storytelling, and who change depending on the storyteller.

Reviewers often describe books as "triumphs," which has always mystified me (a triumph over whom? over what?). But Absalom truly feels like a triumph, the triumph of willing something to life that resists it, as Faulkner pursues his quarry with the same indomitable determination that spurs his main character. To put it crudely, he starts big and he stays big, and it is a joy (a joy verging on despair) to see him pull it off, to read 400 pages of prose that never lets up in intensity, that barrels forward with relentless venom and beauty.

And even in the book's few moments of repose, the music of his writing is always there, that wonderful music of the inner ear: "He remembers how he did not return to his fire but stopped presently in a lonely place and leaned against a pine, leaning quietly and easily, with his head back so he could look up at the shabby shaggy branches like something in wrought iron spreading motionless against the chill vivid stars of early spring, thinking..."

The Public Burning - Robert Coover

From planes, cars, trains, ships, and buses, they debouch upon the city in a breathless rush and scatter, squealing in awe and umbrage, clicking cameras, streaming through the narrow streets in their patterned sportshirts and J.C. Penney dresses like blind and anxious ants, hot on the trail of the unknown. There are bright clusters of them at Rockefeller Plaza, Greenwich Village, Fifth Avenue, crawling all over each other, going where the others go, seeing what the others see. The Battery. The United Nations. The Waldorf-Astoria. Scurrying about, chasing temptations, ogling heights, asking directions, bumping into each other, dropping parcels, taking bus tours, panicking at intersections, getting lost. Some find themselves on the subway while looking for the men's room. Some try to leap off the Empire State Building or photograph the burlesque shows, others get off at the wrong stop on the Third Avenue El and miss everything. They consume staggering quantities of egg rolls, shish kebab, knishes, French doughnuts, Hungarian goulash, oyster stew, and pizza pie, lick millions of postage stamps, trample hotel carpets to shreds, and wrinkle, stain, and burn holes in enough sheets to tent the nation. They get aroused by streetwalkers, maligned by cabdrivers, lectured in Union Square, sunburned at Coney Island, and raped in Central Park.
-pg. 165-6

This book begins after Supreme Court Justice William O Douglas granted the atom spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg a stay of execution and ends three days later when they are put to death by electrocution. Although the events are real, Coover deviates wildly from the script of history, and in perhaps the most inspired decision of the book, allows then-Vice President Richard M. Nixon to narrate over half of the action, who, as a character, turns out to be a sweating, bumbling, fumbling, suspicious, paranoid, mess of a man, although ingeniously presented so as to provide the only real bit of pathos in the entire farce. Coover uses some funny gimmicks, the most prominent of which is that the idea of Uncle Sam is transformed into a flesh-and-blood superhero, kicking ass in Korea, fighting the Phantom, his ubiquitous Commie nemesis, all over the world, keeping the light of America alive at home, and generally directing the energies and excesses of the grandeur that is America towards life, liberty and the pursuit of un-American activities. A few of the others he shoehorns in right from the get-go are Time Magazine as the young Poet Laureate, the New York Times as some monument to which you make a pilgrimage, and, as above, the chaos and crass consumption that epitomizes Times Square serving as a totem for all that is hallowed in this America of Coover's imagination.

But is it so richly imagined? Is it, as it were, inspired? To say so would be to deny the ugliness of a reflection, to blame a mirror for its accuracy rather than because of its warp and wobble. For all the inventiveness thrown in, for every ridiculous exaggeration, there is an element of truth that clings and leaves a stink, like shit stuck on your shoe, and as the shit accrues, it becomes incredibly difficult not to be disturbed by this vision of America, by a vision of America that, while absurd, rings true.

The prose is both maddening and delightful; Coover has an ear for every carnival barker's braying voice, every Congressman's whinging cavil, every man on the street's pedestrian petulance, and he's got the poetry of the prurient press down pat. The most remarkable accretions of sheer language come spilling out of Uncle Sam's mouth, mashing all pioneers' ho-hum hokum platitudes, jingoism's jangly jargon, liberty's lies, democracy's delusions, and Coover lets it all hang out with respect to literary device. Snatches of plays, opera, and poetry infiltrate the text like spies, and language is--becomes--like some cold war, with beauty on the one side and ugliness on the other, seething in some not-truce because of mutually assured destruction, and at the center of it all is Tricky Dick's self-centered whining voice, plotting, doubting, going on mock offensives, falling back to lick old wounds, rallying to stand at center stage to declare: All life, all of it, is but a play within a play. And like any good American, he's convinced he's the main character.

A Heart So White by Javier Marias

"The friendship or business relationship between our fathers sometimes brought us together, although he was always closer to the adults, more interested in their world, as if impatient to form a part of it and to act independently, I remember him as a child old before his time or a frustrated adult, a man condemned to remain too long in the incongruous body of a boy, obliged to endure a fruitless wait that consumed him. It wasn't that he took part in the adults' conversations, he was devoid of pedantry -- he just listened -- it was more as if he were gripped by a kind of sombre tension, inappropriate in a boy, which made him seem always alert, always looking out of windows, like someone looking out at a world slipping by before his eyes and which he's not yet allowed to enter... He always gave the impression that he was missing out on something and was painfully aware of it, he was one of those individuals who want to live several lives at once, to be many, not limited to being only themselves: people who are horrified at the idea of unity."

A Heart So White is, on its surface, about a suicide in a family, and how that suicide comes to haunt the next generation. But the book, narrated by Juan, a translator by occupation, is essentially a rumination on many fine topics, including the nature of secrets, language, marriage and memory. Of particular concern to Juan is the relationship between what could have happened and what actually did happen, and whether there is any difference between the two, given the weakness of our memories and our tendency to lovingly dwell on missed opportunities and the dreamy future. I could discuss this further, as well as the role that storytelling and language play in such a dynamic, but then again I could drop it altogether, which, if Marias or Juan is to be believed, amounts to the same thing anyway. Such a state of affairs should make me despair, but it really doesn't, and I suppose that's one of the nice things about literature: we can choose which books we treat as scripture.

That is not to say that this is a bad book or that Marias is a bad writer. To the contrary, A Heart So White is well written, and full of provocative images and phrases that are repeated and eventually spiral in on each other as Juan unwillingly enters the vortex of his family history. With its emphasis on language, and the hall-of-mirrors effect produced by his use of doubles and possible coincidences, it could be a good candidate for anyone wanting to break out the analytical toolkit that has gone dusty with neglect since college. (This was the game I played for a while before happily giving up.) There is also one brilliant and hilarious scene in which Juan, the translator, spices up a staid meeting between two government officials from different countries by translating a benign request for tea as, "Tell me, do the people in your country love you?"

But in the end, with its detached, ironic tone, the book felt rather bloodless, and was hard to love.