Waiting (for the Great Leap Forwards?)

Waiting - Ha Jin
(Winner: National Book Award, 1999)
This is a story of army doctor Lin Kong who, having married the woman his parents chose, Shuyu, leaves her to care for his parents while he works in the city. Even when his parents die he feels too embarrassed to bring her to the city because she is uneducated, older and her feet are bound.
In the hospital he works at he falls for Manna Wu, a younger nurse. He cannot get a divorce and so they must wait, and wait, for eighteen years.
There is a startling blankness at the heart of this book. The tone is similar to a folk tale where the most outrageous events are treated as if they were totally normal. And so they were, as far as I can tell.
The insight into China at the height of the cultural revolution is one reason to read this book. It is a vision of a bureaucracy of Kafkaesque proportions.

Gilead

Gilead - Marilynne Robinson

"Is there no balm in Gilead?"

Three books in and Marilynne Robinson' is clearly creating a  body of work which can be compared with any other. I read this and Home back to front (Home is a sequel to Gilead, written from a different perspective) but found that one still deepened the other to an extraordinary degree.  I could quite happily spend a lifetime  looking at the town of Gilead if each perspective were as beautifully realised as it is in these two extraordinary books. The variations of the story between perspectives have set me to imagining other perspectives and narratives hidden within what we have been given. It seems as blind and fathomless as life itself.

Fight Club

Fight Club - Chuck Palahniuk

For some reason I am finding it very hard to settle down to writing my response top Fight Club. Maybe because I am totally uncertain as to my response. Maybe because I didn't have my trusty pen to hand to jot down the quotes that struck me as I read. Looking through these often clarifies my thinking.
Anyway, rather than let it fester undone any longer I am going to tackle it TODAY. (4/7/11)
The first thing that struck me about Fight Club was that the narrator (or author) was pretty unreliable.

The Yellow Wallpaper

'

The Yellow Wallpaper - Charlotte Perkins Gilman (a.k.a. Stetson)
(Above title links to story)
This is not really more than a short story but it's place on the 1001 Books allows me to award myself another book read and move towards a less ignominious failure in my attempt to read 100 books this year.
Short though it is The Yellow Wallpaper is remarkably rich in symbolism and almost feels like the birth pangs of a consciousness. The conjugal bed and the nursery are combined into a mixture between a prison cell and a psychiatric ward.
"It was nursery first and then playroom and gymnasium, I should judge; for the windows are barred for little children, and there are rings and things in the walls."
The titular wallpaper has a pattern that the narrator cannot make out, and the story is driven by repeated phrases and images.
The narrator is staying in this quiet country house as a 'cure', her husband and brother united in the belief that she is suffering from a 'temporary nervous disposition' although she believes 'that congenial work, with excitement and change, would do me good.'  But excitement is not to be hers because 'He is very careful and loving, and hardly lets me stir without special direction.' 'He' is her husband, and jailer.

Madame Bovary

Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert

Recently I got into a discussion about which books I should have read and Madame Bovary featured high on the list (and it's a lot shorter than Remembrance of Things Past) so I bumped it to the top of my ever expanding pile of books.  Books that threaten to overwhelm me with their demands, their insidious paper fingers, their words like confetti silently falling around me as I fall too! The dangers of fiction. And then the dangers of having to write about it. What can be left to say about Madame Bovary that hasn't been said a thousand times before.
 Madame Bovary seems to me to be, like Don Quixote, a warning on the dangers of books. They only give birth to illusions, all of which, in the eye of Flaubert, shall be dulled by life. "Before the wedding, she had believed herself in love. But not having obtained the happiness that should have resulted from that love, she now fancied that she must have been mistaken. And Emma wondered exactly what was meant in life by the words 'bliss', 'passion', 'ecstasy', which had looked so beautiful in books."

Irish Blood, English Heart

Irish Blood, English Heart - Sean Campbell

This books tells a story that has long fascinated me, the story of how the children of Irish emigrants to England became some of the most important musicians in English rock music. It focuses on the eighties, interrogating the stories of Kevin Rowland (Dexy's Midnight Runners), Shane McGowan (The Pogues) and Morrissey and Marr (The Smiths).

The Hours

The Hours - Michael Cunningham

The twenties were known as The Jazz Age and is is fitting that this book, based on one of the key books of the twenties, should use the methodology of jazz. The repetition of key phrases in different settings, with different emphasis means that we constantly reevaluate not just The Hours but also Woolf's Mrs Dalloway, from which it takes its inspiration.
Indeed, picking up this inspired me to pick up Woolf's book and read it first and I am glad that I did so. I feel that having it fresh in my mind allowed me to appreciate the way Cunningham picked up, twisted and gathered together many threads from Mrs Dalloway, at times almost quoting long passages, at others merely brushing against the form of the earlier book.

The Handmaid's Tale

The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood

Reductio ad absurdum  is a form of argument in which a proposition is disproven by following its implications logically to an absurd consequence. 

Atwood's use of language in The Handmaid's Tale is almost mathematical. I felt that I could clearly see many of the locations and was often stopped in my tracks by the precision of her prose. She manages to make the confabulation of religious fundamentalism and extreme feminism convincing, and indeed there have been some regimes that sprung into existence since this book was written that might have used it as an inspiration rather than a warning.

Mrs Dalloway

Mrs Dalloway - Virginia Woolf

Quotes from Virginia Woolfs' diary in 1922 while she read Ulysses:

"I have read 200 pages so far," 

 "amused, stimulated, charmed, interested ... to the end of the Cemetery scene." 

 "puzzled, bored, irritated, & disillusioned" "by a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples." 

 "illiterate, underbred book ... of a self taught working man" 

 "we all know how distressing they are, how egotistic, insistent, raw, striking, & ultimately nauseating" 

These, and other quotes pepper the internet and because of them and the obvious similarities between Mrs Dalloway and Ulysses, it is hard to think of Mrs Dalloway completely separately from Joyces' magnum opus. Both are narrated through internal voices and both take place over the course of a single day. 

I couldn't help seeing the following quote as referring (less than) obliquely to Joyce. "Now for instance, there was a man writing quite openly in one of the respectable weeklies about water closets."

Shutter Island

Shutter Island - Dennis Lehane

"But it's all a bit Grand Guignol, don't you think?"

U.S. Marshal's visit a secure psychiatric institution on an island when a patient escapes from a seemingly locked room. There are strange rumours surrounding the institute as well as water.

Gradually we find that one of the marshals has ulterior motives and that one of the patients is intimated involved in a tragedy from his personal life. It becomes clear that more is going on than first meets the eye.

The Master

The  Master - Colm Tóibín
(Winner of the 2006 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award)

As a sheet of blotting paper is dipped in lysergic acid so the pages of this book are dipped in regret. Regret begat of the fear of failure, the fear of touch, a life lived, perhaps, too carefully.
This is a picture of a man who, in Tóibín's reading of him, chose mastery above company, above love. The book deals with Henry James in his late fifties as the nineteenth century comes to a close. It is a window into those times and allows Tóibín to explore moral hazard, homosexuality at the time and the relationship between the English and the Irish.
The novel opens with the build up to the opening of James' play Guy Domville and it's success/ failure is compared with that of the success du jour Oscar Wilde who has many plays playing simultaneously and is in many ways the antithesis of James.

No Longer at Ease

No Longer at Ease - Chinua Achebe

One of the things I am trying to do this year is to fill in some of the more obvious gaps in my reading and Achebe was certainly one of those. In fact my reading of African literature is pretty shallow. I was looking out for Things Fall Apart but having picked up the second book in his trilogy (Arrow of God is the third) I thought I would read this anyway as it was suggested that they were a very loose trilogy and worked well separately.
The (anti)hero of the tale Obi Okonkwo is a graduate returning to Nigeria from England. His degree is seen as his entry ticket for the good life and he talks of how his country can be changed and the endemic corruption excised.
I was reminded of Joyce at times during this book. We get Obi's takes on two of the most influential European books about Africa, Greene's The Heart of the Matter and Conrad's Heart of Darkness. This reminds me of Stephen's reading of Hamlet in Ulysses, and indeed The Heart of the Matter and No Longer at Ease would be interesting companion reads.

Master Georgie

Master Georgie - Beryl Bainbridge

Forward, the Light Brigade!' 
Was there a man dismay'd?
Not tho' the soldier knew 

Some one had blunder'd: 

Theirs not to make reply, 

Theirs not to reason why, 

Theirs but to do & die, 

Into the valley of Death 

Rode the six hundred.
(from Charge of the Light Brigade - Tennyson) 

"I am at least better off as far as transport is concerned; three days ago over two hundred cavalry horses of the Light Brigade stampeded into the camp, their riders having perished in a charge along the north valley."
(from Master Georgie - Beryl Bainbridge)

The Twin

The Twin - Gerbrand Bakker

The narrator of this novel, Helmer, is the remaining half of a set of identical twins and much of him died with his twin Henk. Henk would have worked on the farm with their father and taken it over in time. Helmer had been studying literature in Amsterdam, but when Henk dies his father decides that that is over ("you're done there in Amsterdam")and Helmer spends the next three and a half decades drowning.

His mind seems to be lost between what was and what might have been while his body carries out all the actions required to keep the small farm going.      

"'We don't have TV here', I say.
'What? What do you do at night?'
'Read the newspaper, do the paperwork, check the animals.'
'Paperwork?'
'Uh-huh. Nitrate records, health records for the vet, quality control records for the dairy ---'"

The Polysyllabic Spree

The (Complete) Polysyllabic Spree - Nick Hornby

This is a collection of a series of articles on his reading matter that Nick Hornby wrote for The  Believer Magazine between September 2003  and June 2006. It seemed like appropriate reading matter given my current reading spree.

The titular Spree is  Nick's take on the editors of the magazine whom he represents as a sort of religious cult whose number fluctuate wildly and wear white robes similar to The Polyphonic Spree (see below) when not wearing nothing at all.

Pedro Páramo

Imaginary cover from here

Pedro Páramo - Juan Rulfo
(Translated by Lysander Kemp)

"Noises. Voices. Murmurs. Faraway songs."

I first came across the name of Rulfo amoung many other Mexican writers in Roberto Bolano's The Savage Detectives. I had no idea what to expect but the cover looked interesting and the excerpt on the back saying that Rulfo "views history as a tragic circus in which evil impresarios betray clowns by making them believe in their own masquerade" was intriguing.

And this is a strange and intriguing book. On one level this is the story of an immoral, Macchievellian ranch owner which could form the basis for a Sergio Leone film. On another it is a Mexican The Waste Land, with a vertiginous chorus from beyond the grave whispering parts of their stories into our ears as the wind blows the dust through the empty landscape or the rain turns the dust into mud.

The Radetzky March

The Radetzky March - Joseph Roth
(translated by Michael Hofmann)

Early on in this book  reading is discussed. - "Then he took his booklist out of his pocket, and handed it to his father. 'Some solid reading matter there!' said the District Commissioner. 'Now. Tell me the plot of Zriny!' Carl Joseph gave a résumé, act by act. Then he sat down, tired, pale, his tongue parched." At times this blog's demand that I report on each book can start to resemble a sort of formal grilling. It is somehow harder when the book is richer and broader and seems to demand a response that does it justice.

This has probably been the highlight of my reading year so far. It is a magnificent book. It manages to combine in it's pages broad comedy (Carry on Hapsburgs) with individual heartbreak, history, philosophy and the ache of centuries.

X-Ray

X-Ray by Ray Davies

Kronikles of a Kink

This is a genuine oddity - rock autobiography as metafiction. Rather than give us a straightforward memoir (never really on the cards) Davies talks to us through a fictional nineteen year old orphan who has been brought up to be a faceless mediocrity by the all powerful Corporation and has now been told to "document the life and times of one Raymond Douglas Davies, who was a composer and the lead singer of the Kinks, one of the leading beat groups of that era*." (*the sixties)

A series of interviews then take place in "the legendary Konk studio" "festooned in cobwebs and dust." MetaDavies waits in the gloom and one of the first things he says is that "There is no time here. No future nor past."

The Wrong Kind of Blood

*

The Wrong Kind of Blood - Declan Hughes

Declan Hughes' name will always have a resonance for me because of the experience of seeing his play Digging for Fire. I still remember the strong feeling that I had during the play that I could get out of my seat and simply stroll onto the stage and belong there. These were my peers, talking like we talked and with the same references we shared. Drink, Emigration, AIDS, The Pixies and a sensibility that seemed to be perfectly realised.

When I saw his name on the cover of a crime novel I was intrigued enough to buy it and finally (it's been there a while amoung the hundreds of unread refugees from charity shop bookshelves) I got around to reading it.

Deliverance

Deliverance - James Dickey

Four men set off for some white water rafting and a spot of illegal hunting in a 'wild' landscape of hills and a river that is due to be covered by damned water in the near future. (That's water held back by a large concrete edifice and not H₂O from Hell).

The journey is planned over steins of beer and main instigator Lewis sells it to the other three as an opportunity to have a 'real' experience before 'the real estate people get hold of it and make it into one of their heavens.'

Lewis is someone who "tries by any means - weight lifting, diet, exercise, self-help manuals from taxidermy to modern art - to hold on to his body and mind and improve them, to rise above time.' The narrator, Ed, has accompanied him through many of these interests and admires him although he can see that he holds a type of death wish. He too seems concerned with the onset of middle age, and unsatisfied with his relatively successful city life and marriage.