The Sound of Things Falling

The Sound of Things Falling - Juan Gabriel Vásquez

"Then I realized no one wants to hear heroic stories, but everyone likes to be told about someone else's misery."

I was lucky enough to win a signed copy of this Impac Dublin Literary Award winning novel on Twitter, just in time for #spanishlitmonth. I finished reading it a couple of weeks ago but it has, like some other posts languished in my drafts folder since then. However, in a final effort to post on some Spanish Lit for #spanishlitmonth, I am returning to it, grinding through the gears of my memory.

The book opens with the shooting of one of the hippopotami that took to the Columbian countryside fro the huge outdoor zoo presided over by Pablo Escobar before his death in 1993. This reminds the narrator, Antonio Yammara, of his own memories that are tied up with the zoo and the Columbia represented by it, a Columbia where the drug cartel seemed untouchable, able to bribe, intimidate or kill anyone who stood against it.

City of Bohane

City of Bohane - Kevin Barry

"This is the Bohane river we're talking about. A backwater surge, malevolent, it roars in off the Big Nothin' wastes and the city was spawned by it and was named for it: city of Bohane."

I came to City of Bohane on the back of some strong recommendations, some great short stories and its success in winning the International Impac Dublin Literary Award. High hopes are often hard to live up to but this book both managed to satisfy and surprise.

The book is like a film noir firework show, words and phrases going off like Catherine Wheels and Roman Candles, Rockets and Spinners, Fountains and Mines. Amoung the blast and whistle of the verbal pyrotechnics are passages that hang, burning themselves quietly into your cortex, like Chinese Lanterns.

Let the Great World Spin

Let the Great World Spin - Colum McCann

It is hard to avoid cliches when talking about this. It invites the automatic blurb generator to cough and splutter into action:
"a dizzying achievement"
"a high wire act"
"poise and balance"
"vertiginous"

The book circles Philippe Petit's astonishing high wire walk between the two towers of the World Trade Centre in 1974, a feat that induces vertigo even thinking about it. It was also the subject of the hugely successful documentary Man on Wire, which I have yet to see.

The Known World

The Known World - Edward P. Jones

Time to return to book reviewing here at Vapour Trails after a hiatus caused by my focus on my Top 102 Albums⁺. Although I intend to continue blogging on my favourite albums I will not be doing so quite as regularly and hope to achieve a mix of book and music posts. I also hope to write on film a bit more, although I do often find that by the time I can settle down to watch a film I am too tired to do so.

I knew nothing about this book when I started reading and was therefore surprised when one of the central conceits was revealed after a few pages, in this description of the slave Moses and his master, Henry Townsend.  "He was thirty-five years old and for every moment of those years he had been someone's slave, a white man's slave and then another white man's slave and now, for nearly ten years, the overseer slave for a black master." In fact  I was a little afraid that the 'black master' might be a 'gimmick' that was the reason for the book's popularity but as I read on this fear proved unfounded.

The book pushes you to try to understand what it was to only have value as livestock and to be bought and sold at a whim, moved away from friends and family as a child or an adult, even put down if you were too troublesome. Even free blacks were required to carry their papers with them at all times and were repeatedly forced to show them by the law, which mainly existed to ensure that no slaves escaped.

De Niro's Game

De Niro's Game - Rawi Hage
(Winner of the Impac Dublin Literary Award 2008)

Full of bomb blasted poetry, De Niro's Game takes us deep into a shattered world, where language digs through the archeology of a city to find a barren future in a bloody past. Beirut is the setting for most of this book, a place of chaos and memory, where the anarchic and bourgeois live hand in hand: "Ten thousand bombs had landed on Beirut, that crowded city, and I was lying on a blue sofa covered with white sheets to protect it from dust and dirty feet."

The book centres on the friendship between two young men who have been friends since childhood, the narrator Bassam and George, a.k.a. De Niro, a war orphan. There are clear parallels with Mean Streets with the attraction of being outside the law magnified by the difficulties of living in a war torn city where you have to wait in line for everything. After all, "Thugs never waited in lines."

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.

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 ---'"

My Name is Red

"I am the only historical novelist in the world who can point out his subjects with his finger." Orhan Pamuk

This is the first book I have read by Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk. It won't be the last. This is a wonderful feast of ideas, on one level a historical murder mystery set in the sixteenth / seventeenth century but on another an exploration of art and artistry, of the interplay between images and psychology, the sweep of history and the way Istanbul is at the nexus of  Christian and Moslem worldviews.

A central theme of the novel is perspective. The miniatures are painted from the specultive perspective of Allah. There is a growing awareness of Venetian painting and the increasing realism of Western painting and their use of different perspectives. A preacher rails against this 'blasphemy' and this stirs up trouble amongst the miniaturists who are working on a book of illustrations using elements of the western 'style'.

Logging

Original Post - Tuesday, May 22, 2007

I've finished reading Per Pettersons' (IMPAC shortlisted) Out Stealing Horses which I immediately filed as one of those books which will be read again. (Much like the novel's hero re-reads Dickens). The book concerns an aging man who relocates into the deep countryside some time after losing his second wife in a car crash. By chance his only neighbour is someone who he knew during dramatic formative events in his adolescence. This kicks up the dust of his memories and the past starts to come back in startling clarity into his pared down life. This is something that has often fascinated me - the fact that there are people out there who probably understand and remember episodes of my life that I neither understand nor clearly remember.