Monday, November 27, 2006
Egyptologist by Arthur Phillips
Friday, November 17, 2006
Greatest hits of the 1980's
In his book Immortality Milan Kundera mentions that Robert Musil died while lifting weights. I remember Kundera being very popular in the early 90's, partially because the firm The Unbearable Lightness of Being. I haven't heard much of him lately -- neither about Michel Tournier, another author who was very popular about the same time.
To be a bit rude, maybe both Kundera and Tournier should have stopped writing earlier. Kundera's Unbearable Lightness was great (though many women that I know think he is unfairly chauvinistic), so was Tournier's The Erl-King.
As far as I know, Andre Brink wrote his most memorable books (An Instant in the Wind, Dry White Season) in the 1980's and I don't remeber hearing much of his later books.Russian literature 20th century
Oddly enough I really like Anna Akhmatova's (Ahmatova's) poems, though I don't speak Russian and I can only read the translations. I used to carry a paperback copy of her selected poems with me until the book disintegrated. I could not find this poem using Google, so here's a rendering by heart. "Three things in the world he loved. Evensongs, peacocks, old maps of America. Hated children crying and rashberry jam for tea. Could not stand female hysteria. And I was his wife."
The translation (or what I remember of it) is by D.M. Thomas, a notable author himself. Thomas' Flute Player actually has characters like Akhmatova and her friends (Osip Mandelstam and Elena Tsvetayeva). Thomas seems to have translated Pushkin and Yevtushenko, too. Yevtushenko is a skilled poet but I found him a bit too eager to please the audience and the public opinion. Interestingly the Wikipedia article about him poses him as a great critic of bureaucracy, stalinism and indifference in the USSR, even a sort of anti-communist. In reality even his autograph carried a sickle and a hammer during the USSR era.
In this months New Yorker there was a new translation of Akhmatova's poem. I liked Thomas' better.
Vladimir Mayakovsky is a bit childish compared to Ahmatova, but his poetry is fun and provocative at its best. In the 1990's I managed to trace down translations of all his plays, too, though some of them were only published as dialogue sheets for actors. The plays were quite good, really tackling the issues of bureaucracy and indifference. No wonder Mayakovsky commited a suicide when he noticed where Stalin and his mates were taking the country.
Seriously? Not quite
Muriel Spark: Loitering with Intent. Ms. Spark passed away earlier this year. The book is an amusing account of life imitating art in "The Autobiographical Association".
Another author with a light-hearted touch: Amelie Nothomb. Her semi-autobiographical Le Sabotage amoureux takes place in Beijing while Stupeur et Tremblement tells about "her" experiences in a big company in Tokyo. However, I found more enjoyable the completely fictional Hygiène de l'assassin (something about an old author who drives his interviewers mad), Attentat (a modern Hunchback of Notre Dame tale), Cosmétique de l'ennemi (a traveller haunts another at the departure lobby of an airport).
Coincidences and travelling
Paul Auster's The Red Notebook is a full of surprising coincidences.
Recently read Paul Theroux' semi autobiographical My Secret History. Since the book covers several periods of the main character's life, one can only quess what has happened in between. Here, too, the effect of almost coincidental events is skillfully spelled out: if there were no boat accident, Andy Parent might have ended up being a priest; if he did not have enough courage to speak to a young British lady in Malawi (and if her friend had not gone to the bathroom)..
Theroux tells about his experiences as a school teacher in Malawi and Uganda in the late 1960's. Previously I had read his "Dark Star Safari" from 2000; he re-visits Africa. Interestingly, he observes that "Africa is materially more decrepit than it was when I first knew it, hungrier, poorer, less educated, more pessimistic, more corrupt". Theroux has seen too much to force just one explanation for the decline, but many examples he quotes in both My Secret history and Dark Star Safari reveal stunning waste of resources and possibilities due to short sighted planning.
Theroux naturally mentions another great travel writer, V.S. Naipaul, both in My Secret history and Dark Star Safari. Naipaul's Among the Believers has a cleverly simplistic theme. Naipaul travels to Iran, Pakistan, and Indonesia just after the revolution is Iran 1979 and asks government officials and clerics some very simple questions like "how are going to make this work?". He seldom gets good answers.
One of the Naipaul's questions "how are you going to make banks works", has got an unexpected answer in the 2000's. Islamic banks have been a success.
Naipaul won the Nobel price 2001, seemingly. Gao Xingjian won the price 2000. Needless to say, his Soul Mountain is good. It's strangely captivating though it does not seem a story as such. His short stories in "Buying a fishish rod" are very good, too.. It's quite understandable that he left China; his stories are quite far from propaganda and his characters far from heroic workers.
Bruce Chatwin is yet another great travel writer. Songlines, his account on travels among the abos in Australia, is very interesting.
Houellebecq
Japanese authors
Apparently, the literary themes of the current Heisei period are, if possible, even more diverse than those of the previous ones. Haruki Murakami ("Sputnik Sweetheart", "After the Quake", "Hard boiled Wonderland") is almost too fluent.
I was not convinced but still worth reading
(1) Nora Okja Keller: Comfort Woman. An interesting topic: the daughter tells the story of her mother who was forced in prostitution by Japanese soldiers during the 2nd World War.
(2) Ruth Ozeki: My Year of Meats. Food industries and relationships. Food industry part quite interesting, but you'd learn more about it from non-fiction.
(3) Jonathan Safran Foer: Everything is Illuminated. It's difficult to combine war memories with comedy. I think Foer succeeds in some parts.
Quite ok
A bit like having not-your-favourite wine for dinner; you don't enjoy every sip but you don't throw away the wine, either.
(1) Hisaye Yamamoto: Seventeen Syllables and Other Stories. Japanese second generation immigrants in the U.S. Realistic and interesting deciptions of the internment camps, among other things. Ms. Yamamoto writes well but has sometimes "lapses", sentences so long that one loses the track where something refers to.
(2) Rupert Thomson: The Insult. Mr. Blom lost his eyesight after a shooting accident.. or did he? The starting point oft he novel is really interesting but it quite does not hold its grip.
(3) Michael Ondaatje: In the Skin of a Lion. Coroners examining skeletons in Sri Lanka after the civil war. Ondaatje's style is most abstemious, sometimes almost barren.
(4) Coetzee: Foe. Maybe in the 80's discussions about "X in reality vs. X in print" felt more relevant, but now they are a bit tiring. Luckily, Coetzee's Disgrace was much more enjoyable. It took me some time to realize that the female lead of Foe owes a lot to Moll Flanders.
Pearls
Another section: rare pearls. I guess almost everyone has had this experience: in a second hand book shop you pick up some title that you find remotely interesting. Reading it, you realise it's actually very good.
(1) Jens Bjørneboe: Silence. Rage and irony. An account of Pizarro destroying the Inca capital.. an account that could sound worse that it really was, but Jared Diamond cites the original source in "Guns, Germs and Steel" (see http://markoniinimaki.blogspot.com/) and we learn that the reality was more awful than the Norwegian author could imagine.
(2) Daniel Mason: The Piano Tuner. First I though the idea to be yet another copy of the Heart of Darkness, but the book proved me wrong. The author sure knows a lot about pianos, Burmese dances and puppet theatre, and plants.
(3) Jasper Fforde: The Ayre Affair, Lost in a Good Book, The Well of Lost Plots, Something Rotten. Suppose one could actually step in a book. Thursday Next, a police officer (sort-of) can, but for her it's not a hobby; she needs to keep intruders out. All these Thursday Next books have brilliant ideas, e.g. Wuthering Heights being originally a country comedy but getting in its current state because the characters start hating another.. and science being like a boy band.
(4) Julia Bell: Massive. Superficially a book about eating disorders for teenagers. For some reason really interesting.
(5) Raj Kamal Jha: If You Are Afraid of Heights. Very skilled, quite pessimistic
(6) Ali Smith: Hotel world. So, now we know what happens after we die. Even more plausible than Alice Sebold's popular The Lovely Bones.
I noticed that Sebold is married to Glen Gold. Gold's "Carter Beats the Devil" is truly captivating and well written light fiction, a bit like Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay.
Another section: I was not disappointed.
(1) Nuruddin Farah: Gifts. Normal life in Mogadishu, Somalia. The reader does not feel like a voyerist - the author is Somalian and tells about the lives of ordinary people without exaggeration.
(2) Jeannette Winterson (except for Power Book). Often labeled as a romantic author, Winterson can seemingly write about anything and make it captivating.
(3) Peter Carey: My Life as a Fake. If the characters were any more lifelike they would walk out of the book.
(4) Margaret Atwood: The Blind Assassin. Yes, Atwood can really write. Think about combining Edith Wharton and pulp sci-fi.
(5) Grahan Swift: Waterland. So absorbing that you almost see the landscape and hear people speaking.
(6) Gabriel Garcia Marquez. His most famous stuff has been analysed so much that I won't bore you, but just a note. There is a Brazilian very popular author who wrote a book about an insane asylum (set in Slovenia). Gabriel Garcia Marquez' collection Strange Pilgrim has a story called "I only came to use the phone". It is wonderfully distant and ironic.. and makes the Slovenia book look romantic and pretentious in comparison.
(7) Jeffrey Eugenides: Middlesex. Simply captivating.
Some other good collections of short stories (1) Raymond Carver: Elephant. The last story, about the death of Chekhov, is quite different from the others (2) Carson McCullers: The Ballad of a Sad Cafe (3) Truman Capote: Breakfast at Tiffany's etc. Seen the film? The book is very different.
Capote somehow had the talent of creating really memorable characters like Holly Golithly of the Breakfast or Lily Jane Bobbit in Children on their Birthdays.
Families are psychotic
Philip Roth is a skilled author and Tokyo is a big city in Japan. I remember reading Roth a long time ago (Goodbye Columbus), but its his recent books (American Pastoral, I Married a Communist) that I found really captivating. Incidentally (1) there are several works by the title "I Married a Communist": a 1949 film and an excellent comic book J'ai épousé une communiste by Swiss cartoon artists D. Willemin and Pet (2) I had an impression that Roth had 5 candidates shortlisted among 10 for the best U.S. book. But as usual I did not bookmark the list nor the organisation.
In addition to Roth, there must be many authors who write great books about U.S. middle class families. Everyone knows John Irving and E.L. Doctorow but my recent favourite has been Jhumpa Lahiri's Namesake. Her short stories in The Interpreter of Maladies were brilliant, too.
And in the realm of not-so middle class stories, Tony Morrison's Jazz, Paradise and Love are stunningly good.
In a complete different category, Douglas Coupland's "All Families are Psychotic" is amusing and has lots of good ideas.
