As I Lay Dying. Another fast reread for school. I reread this because I wrote my seminar paper on this novel and Last Orders; the latter borrows plot and structure and theme pretty heavily from Faulkner. As I Lay Dying is a book that I like better every time I read it, because the story is deceptively simple and you can miss a lot.

This will be on my exam list and the book club is discussing it in March, so I will probably have more to say about it then.

Atonement. I forgot to list this one because it was a very fast reread for school. When I read it last year, I had this to say:

I did not hate it. I enjoyed some parts of it a lot, and some parts of it just went on and on forever. I disagree with Ian [scroll down to his Atonement review] about the metafictional elements; I think they were the only reason for this book to exist. (And I am very glad that people aren’t still just rewriting the works of Jane Austen.) That said, I don’t think the metafictional stuff here is particularly interesting. The long section at the end was too much.

Do not read this next section unless you have already read both Atonement and Life of Pi; if you have read both, drag your mouse over the blank space to see my comments:

These Booker nominees really need a new gimmick. Life of Pi definitely pulled it off in a more interesting and enlightening fashion, but this trick is getting a little old. I might have been more impressed by Atonement had I not seen this coming a mile away. I feel like I’ve read the same book eight times in the last few years. In Life of Pi I felt like he was doing something different with the gimmick, but I don’t think McEwan is doing anything new here and his story is not otherwise very interesting.

Another spoilery bit that you should skip unless you’ve read Atonement:

Over the last week or so I was worried that McEwan was going to give me a cheater ending like he did with Amsterdam, but the fact that Briony was revising history wasn’t what I was worried about. (I figured that out as soon as we got to Robbie’s story. I’m not sure what clued me in, though; it just felt obvious.) I was just afraid that he was going to make Robbie the villain after all, which would have been cheating. I am still not sure if Marshall as the villain was supposed to be a surprise; I don’t think it was because McEwan practically told us that he was the rapist even before the rape happened.

This is probably my last McEwan novel for a while.

After rereading the novel, I tend to give it more credit and I will even go so far as to say that I liked it and think it is probably McEwan’s best, at least of the books I’ve read. The novel is far more interesting on a second reading, knowing what you know at the end: that information gives far more texture to the character development (although you could argue that there is really only one character in the story) and makes the novel more intellectually satisfying. I still disagree with Ian — without the metafictional frame, this book has no reason to exist, but within that framing McEwan is doing something interesting here.

Desirable Daughters. This is, without competition, the dumbest book I have read all year. I try very hard to not read dumb books, but sometimes one slips under my radar, and before you know it, I am trapped in an idiotic and illogical mystery novel masquerading as literature.

I don’t want to be unfair to Mukherjee, because parts of Desirable Daughters are beautifully written, and I think there was a very good novel hidden in the origins of this book. But the basic story is both overblown and underdeveloped, with wild character shifts to accommodate the demands of a really dumb mystery plot that she ultimately just drops without any resolution.

I cannot describe the stupidity of the plot to you without giving away major spoilers, which I guess doesn’t matter since the mystery is mostly dropped, and to the extent that is resolved at all, it is resolved in a way that makes no logical sense, no plot sense, no character sense. Desirable Daughters has a great deal in common with a Susan Isaacs novel, in that it concerns an intelligent but bored and unsatisfied middle-aged housewife (here she is 34, but the character feels middle-aged) trying to unravel a mystery, except Susan Isaacs would never let a mystery novel end on such a dumb, unsatisfying note.

I am sufficiently disappointed that I don’t think I will read any more of Mukherjee’s novels, but it does seem like she had an interesting character-based novel here that just got mucked up with an unnecessary thriller angle. Too bad.

The Funeral Party. I loved this. At just 154 pages it is barely a novel, and in fact there is something about the way she sketches her characters and places them in a setting that reminds me of a James Joyce short story. The story is terribly sad — a flaky but good-hearted Russian artist in New York is dying at home in the last stages of a disease that seems to be ALS, and his friends and wife and lovers gather in his apartment to see him off. The group is a collection of Russian immigrants, and the story takes place just as the Soviet Union is breaking up. So at the time when they are losing the man who has been the center of their community in New York , they are also conflicted and riveted by the events in their homeland.

I can’t speak for the original Russian, but Cathy Porter’s English translation is just beautiful. Here is one of my favorite passages, one of the moments where Ulitskaya steps back from her characters and writes in more general terms about the lives of the Russian émigrés:

All the people sitting here who had been born in Russian differed in their gifts, their education and human qualities, but they were united by the single act of leaving it. The majority had emigrated legally, some were non-returnees, the most audacious of them ran away across the borders. Yet however their life in emigration had worked out, however much their views differed, they had this one thing in common: this crossed frontier, this crossed, stumbling lifeline, this tearing up of old roots and putting down of new ones in new earth, with its new colours, smells and structures.

As the years went by, even their bodies changed their composition: the molecules of the New World entered their blood and replaced everything old from home. Their reactions, their behavior and their way of thinking gradually altered, but the one thing they still needed was some proof of the correctness of what they had done. The more complicated and insurmountable the difficulties they faced in America, the more necessary this proof was for them. Consciously or not, the news from Moscow about the growing stupidity, lack of talent and criminality of life there during these years provided the proof they needed. But none could have imagined that what was happening in that far-off place which they had all but erased from their lives would be so paintful for them now. It turned out that this country sat in their souls, their guts, and that whatever they thought about it — and they all thought different things — their links with it were unbreakable. It was like some chemical reaction in the blood, something nauseating, bitter and terrible.

Shortly after that passage she moves back to her character, describing how they all share a recurring nightmare about returning to Russia and becoming trapped there, unable to find the papers that would allow them to go back to America. I love this part:

Alik had had an amusing variant of the dream. He was back in Moscow, everything was bright and beautiful, and his old friends were celebrating his return in a large flat, which was familiar yet dreadfully neglected. This friendly scrum of people then accompanied him to Sheremetevo airport, but it was nothing like the heart-rending farewells of past years when everything was for ever, until death. When the time came for him to board the plane, his old friend Sasha Nolikov suddenly appeared and pushed some dogs’ leads into his hands. On the end of them a pack of variously coloured little mongrels jumped about, with husky blood in their veins and with curly tails like pretzels. Sasha disappeared and all of Alik’s friends departed, leaving him alone with the dogs. There was nobody he could give them to, and the check-in for New York was already closing. Then an airline official came to tell him the plane was in the air, and he stayed with the dogs in Moscow knowing that this was for ever.

It is just a beautiful little book, and I will have more to say about it in January when we discuss it in the book club.

Tula Station. What a great book. See my previous comments here and here. I liked this even more than I expected to, even more than I liked Our Lady of the Circus. I said just a few weeks ago that I was a little tired of metafiction, but after reading Tula Station I think I can say that I am tired of pointless metafiction about uninteresting characters.

I am going to take exception to the reviews that suggested that Tula Station is a difficult read, because it is not. Yes, there are multiple layers of fiction here, but the layers are not complex or confusing, and it is not at all difficult to keep the different strands of stories separated. The only part of the novel that could be remotely confusing is near the end, when Froylán begins inventing alternate endings for Capistrán’s story, but the text explains what he is doing and, really, it is not a difficult novel.

Both Froylán and Capistrán are maybe a little difficult to like, but not in a way that ruins the story. About midway through the novel I started to be bothered by some of the two main characters’ sexism, but then I noticed that their sexism was not ruining the novel for me: it was just part of what made them such sad people. I say “sad people” because I don’t want to call them “tragic characters,” since in both cases they are responsible for a lot of what is wrong with them. And I don’t think the novel itself is sexist, because I had no trouble relating to and understanding the female characters even if the two male protagonists were too stuck in macho romanticism to share that understanding.

Like Our Lady of the Circus, this novel feels like it could have been a magical realist novel even though it is not. If magic had sprung up in the middle of Tula it would not have felt out of place. I read one review that suggested that Toscana has replaced magical elements with chaos theory, and I can buy that.

I really wish I understood the quasi-historical background of the novel, which was mentioned in some of the reviews. There is a real Tula, Mexico, and in particular there is a real abandoned city called Tula, but that Tula was an Aztec city abandoned thousands of years before the events in this novel. The descriptions I found of the modern city of Tula, Tula de Allende, sound nothing like the town in the novel. I also do not understand the significance of the name Juan Capistrán, which in the novel is not related to the saint. And the other characters make fun of the names Doménico and Froylán, but I don’t know why those are funny names. I hate it when I’m ignorant.

Still, this is one of the best books I’ve read this year, and highly recommended. I am so disappointed that his most recent novel has apparently not been translated into English.

Like Life. A writing professor and a couple of classmates told me to read Lorrie Moore after reading my short stories. I love this collection so much that I can only assume that what they meant by that recommendation was, “Give it up; Lorrie Moore is writing all the short stories we need; you suck.” She takes everything that was good about Tama Janowitz and early Anne Tyler and makes it deeper, better, more lyrical. I have a new favorite writer.

Flaubert’s Parrot. A lesson to be learned: do not read back covers. A review quoted there compared this book to Pale Fire, so I read it without ever trusting the narrator. Which might have been fine, but I think my mistrust was too deep and it kind of spoiled the book for me. Once again, I admired this book more than I loved it; I think it would annoy the crap out of anyone who is not a past or present English major. I also can’t imagine reading this without having read Madame Bovary, although I was the only person in my class who had read the Flaubert and most of the students enjoyed the book a lot. One guy said he wanted to throw it in the fire, and several people were entirely silent during the class discussion, but at least one person really engaged with the narrator’s story, and several more, like me, admired the writing enough to get over not really caring about the narrator.

I would classify this as a novel but some of my classmates disagreed. It’s a fictional biography and autobiography, an essay on literary biography and criticism, a collection of styles and approaches and sly in-jokes. It is a lot of fun if you are familiar with Flaubert or have an interest in literary criticism, and I suspect it is just a big mysterious mess otherwise.

Jeremy wanted to read this book at one point but I am going to hide it, because if he reads it he will go back to mocking and deriding and generally bitching about lit majors, and I just broke him of that habit, and if he picks it up again I am going to have to kill him.

The French Lieutenant’s Woman. By far my favorite of the books assigned in my contemporary British novel class. Will you kick me out of the cool kids’ club if I say that I am a little bit tired of metafiction? I keep having this nagging feeling that everything the young hotshots are doing, Nabokov did earlier and with far more subtlety. This novel is a bit older — 1964, I think — and now that I’ve read it, I am even more irritated by the authors who think they need to keep revisiting this particular theme (style, whatever). Fowles said everything that needed to be said, and this book is so good, so much fun to read and so engaging on multiple levels, that I think everyone else needs to find a new parlor trick already. (At the very least, now that I’ve read this I don’t understand why Possession was necessary at all.)

I confess, though, that I think Sarah is a contender for most annoying character in fiction. I loved the book in spite of disliking every single character except for the narrator.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. I seem to be the only person on the planet who didn’t really care for this book. I didn’t hate it; I think Haddon’s technique here works pretty flawlessly, and the book was very funny at times. But it felt a little manipulative to me; I wasn’t especially affected by the sad parts of the narrative because I felt a little pushed around, the way you do when you watch an obvious tear-jerker and you just aren’t in the mood to have your tears jerked.

I don’t understand why this was marketed as adult fiction at all, since it is so clearly intended for young adults. At that level it might work very well — I am not really interested in young-adult fiction so I can’t judge it. I thought it was a little too obvious to really work from an adult perspective, though. I confess that I am not a huge fan of the narrative technique of having a narrator who is too young or too messed up to accurately judge the world around him. I mean, it works when the narrator is Benjy or Scout, but usually the technique annoys me. And even in the case of To Kill a Mockingbird, I suspect I would love that book less if I had read it for the first time as an adult.

The Remains of the Day. I respect but did not love this book. I admire Ishiguro’s subtlety and I think his prose is just great, but found it very difficult to get through this book for a couple of reasons. First, the humor is a type that I find intensely embarrassing; I don’t like snickering at a hapless narrator. Second, I can only stand so much butler-speak at one go; the language was too off-putting to hold my interest for more than a few minutes at a time. Finally, we come down to the great Moby Dick issue: at some point you just can’t stand one more second of all that whaling … or in this case, all that butlering.

Once I managed to read more than six pages in a row, I liked the book okay, but it will never be a favorite and I was relieved to finally finish it.

The Ghost Road. I liked this better than The Eye in the Door but not quite as much as Regeneration. I think the trilogy works better as a whole, though, than as individual novels; the only one that really stands alone is Regeneration, and even that one is more compelling as part of the trilogy.

I enjoyed the trilogy a great deal but I am glad that I read it for class, because I think that on my own I would have given up after the first book — not because Barker’s writing is bad or unsatisfying, but because her subject matter is so grim and depressing. World War I: not a barrel of laughs.

If I have a criticism of the trilogy and this book in particular, it is that it occasionally veers into a sort of preachy obviousness. Not often, though — mostly Barker is pretty brilliant in the way she weaves contemporary sensibilities into her historical fiction. Once in a while, though, I felt like the author was back there saying, “See? See how I brilliantly weave contemporary sensibilities into my historical fiction?” I still highly recommend the trilogy if you have the stomach for World War I.

The Eye in the Door. I finished this last week and as with Regeneration, I found it very affecting. But I didn’t think it was quite as good a novel; I thought her prose was a little clunky in some places and she occasionally went for the cheap emotion or explanation when I wanted something more complicated.

Absalom, Absalom!. This is my favorite book in the whole world, and I think it is the best and most important and complete book written about America and the mythology of the south. That’s a bold statement, isn’t it? I defended it in the chat transcripts from our Faulkner seminar. I think Faulkner’s exploration of the whole Gatsby dream and the man-versus-nature ethos is really fascinating. Thomas Sutpen doesn’t conquer the wilderness and build a dynasty out of nothing; he “tears violently” a plantation from the earth. That’s good stuff. We had some disagreement about whether Faulkner was as big a sexist as some of his narrators are, but I think the women here are silent and ghostly on purpose, because they are trapped in the mythos of the south, and that’s no way to live.

During our chats I wound up wondering if Faulkner conceived this book as an answer to Gone With the Wind, because a side-by-side comparison is pretty fascinating. In Faulkner’s world, Scarlet O’Hara could not exist, not because she is so unlikely but because Margaret Mitchell’s pretty fantasyland is so unlikely. Absalom is about sex and rape and violence and the ownership of black men’s and all women’s bodies; it addresses the poison behind the southern myths. The book is brilliant and beautiful and ugly and really hard to read, but it is my favorite book and Faulkner is my favorite author and I forgive him for using “effluvium” seven times in three hundred pages.

Ernest & Ethel. I will never be a committed fan of graphic novels because the format makes me a little impatient, and I come away feeling unsatisfied. I enjoyed this but I don’t have much to say about it. I kind of hated the fast-forward, no-transitions style; I wanted some connections and I felt a little jerked around. I might have more to say once I understand why my professor had us read this, but for now the best thing I can say about the book is that the ending made me tear up a little.

I, The Divine: A Novel in First Chapters. I really enjoyed this novel, although I’m still on the fence as to whether it’s great literature of any kind. Alameddine, a male author, presents the autobiography of Sarah Nour El-Din, a Lebanese-American artist attempting to recount her life but never getting past the first chapter. The novel consists of these abandoned first chapters, and in each one Sarah finds a different focus, a different voice, a different point of view, or just a different starting point.

With less compelling subject matter the first-chapters device could come across as gimmicky or cute, but I thought it played out with reasonable subtlety and created a convincing portrait of a woman approaching middle age and trying to make sense of her self. I also really appreciated the fact that the novel is not only the increasingly familiar story of a person caught between two cultures and two points in history — it is that, but I think Alameddine is doing something more interesting here. Although Sarah’s personal, religious, and family history are all crucial pieces of the puzzle here, in many ways Alameddine could have written this same novel about anyone with much the same effect. You could almost call this novel an especially fine example of postmodern chick lit. Also, it is big on the melodrama.

That said, I loved Sarah and I found the contemporary, pre- and post-civil war Druze cultural elements to be totally fascinating, mostly because I know nothing about Lebanon or Syria or most of the history and myth recounted here and there in the novel. The prose is occasionally a little rough or stilted, but I attributed that to Sarah’s attempts to find an authorial voice that suits her.