Books dcozy finished in 2016

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Books dcozy finished in 2016

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1dcozy
Mar 20, 2016, 1:54 am

Okay, now to get caught up on 2016:

Every Don DeLillo novel is a gift, and considering the austerity and intelligence that characterizes DeLillo's vision of our time one might have expected his 9/11 novel, Falling Man, to be the 9/11 novel. It isn't, I don't think, in part because of the cypher of a character around whom the novel turns, a cypher who is never quite satisfyingly ambiguous or illuminating. Still, as with every DeLillo novel there are sentences, paragraphs, that make one's jaw drop.

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Erle Stanley Gardiner's Perry Mason books seem to have been among Guy Davenport's favorite diversions, and that was enough to motivate me to buy the five on offer at a junk shop in a small California town. I was not disappointed with the earliest written from that stack, The Case of the Stuttering Bishop, and experienced a bit of unearned nostalgia for a time when drivers seemed to routinely stock their cars with pints of whisky.

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John Berger is our best—our only really good?—engaged novelist. The issues explored in his novels always transcend, even as they include, day-to-day politics and are never trivialized or sentimentalized. The art in his novels is never buried beneath agitprop. His epistolary novel, From A to X, is the latest in a line of wonders. His late style glows.

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Reading late DeLillo of late, I was slightly less than completely satisfied with Falling Man (see above), but was entirely enraptured with Point Omega. Here are the hypnotic sentences, the world as complex as life, and a formal shape that can make his books so compelling, so beautiful. I think of American novelists of DeLillo's generation, and when the others have fallen away, it's clear to me that it is DeLillo and Pynchon to whom we will always be eager to return.

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Surrealism generally works better on the canvas than on the page, but Taylor Mignon's translations of the poetry of the avant-garde poet Torii Shozo in Bearded Cones & Pleasure Blades remind me that literary surrealism can also be rewarding. As with surrealist paintings, surrealist poems work best when they have formal integrity, and when they throw off at least a few filaments connecting them to a world like the one in which we live. Torii's poems pass this test (and for a devotee of thrillers, the references throughout to the aesthetics of noir, to a world where trench-coated private eyes would not be out of place, are welcome).

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I picked up The Charioteer, the first of Mary Renault's novels I've read, assuming, based on her reputation and the title that it would be one of her historical novels set in ancient Greece or Rome. It is not. It is, instead, an examination of gay life during World War II that is almost Jamesian in its obliquity. This seems appropriate in that, it becomes clear, gay people had in those day to be terribly oblique about who they were. Renault, who lived with a female companion, is sympathetic, but it is interesting to note that she promulgates some of the accepted wisdom of her time with regard to homosexuality, giving the protagonist, for example, an absent father and a domineering mother. I wonder what bromides about homosexuality and everything else that are being put about today we will chuckle at tomorrow.

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Although I very much enjoyed Jane Gardam's Old Filth, which told the story of a marriage of old English expats from the perspective of the husband, it took me a long time to get to the sequel, The Man in the Wooden Hat, which tells the story of the same marriage from the perspective of the wife. It does an excellent job of artfully reminding us that a marriage need not be perfect to be good.

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The first Perry Mason mystery I read was published in the 1930s, this one, The Case of the Curious Kitten, in 1942. I cringed a bit when a houseboy who identifies himself as Korean but who everyone believes to be one of those wily Japanese was introduced, and happy that at the end, though suspicion had been cast on him, he wasn't the guilty party. The mystery was riveting enough, but it's the period details that are the most arresting. I wish for example, that I had read the following exchange before my most recent trip to the States:

"Mason said to the man behind the counter, 'Two orders of ham and eggs. Keep the eggs straight up and fry them easy. Plenty of French-fried potatoes. Lots of hot coffee, and you might make two cheeseburger sandwiches on the side.'"

I am going to memorize Mason's order before my next trip so I can try it out on an unsuspecting coffee shop waiter or waitress.

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Sesshu Foster uses, in Atomik Aztex, a sort of multiverse model of reality (which may or may not mesh with the Aztec world view) to imagine a universe that contains a timeline in which the advanced Aztec civilization was able to subjugate the primitive Europeans thanks in large part to their mastery of scientific techno magic. Other timelines exist that are more like the one we live in, and our protagonist passes through several of them: he's in Russia fighting the Nazis, and a union organizer in the city of Southern California city of Vernon exterminating hogs in a meat-packing plant. We move through these various realities with the lightness that, say, Guillermo Cabrera Infante leads us through his phantasmagorical Havana. Lots of chuckles, and a certain amount of horror. Does it all, in the next, make sense? Of course not. As Foster says in an opening note, "Persons attempting to find a plot should read Huck Finn."

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Murder City is one of the bleakest books I have ever read, and also, such a superb writer is Charles Bowden, among the most beautiful. Bowden tells us what is happening in Juarez—424 homicides in 2014, for example: it's still happening—and calls out the common lies about why it is happening: "But the nature of life here does not seem to penetrate the minds of people in other places. They seem to think that there is treatment for mental illness available here, but that because of the poverty, it is just more austere than in the wealthier zones of the earth. They talk about police corruption, but seem to think in terms of a place like Chicago, and so they do not perceive this as a real problem. They read about the murders, but tell themselves that murders are high in Detroit. They know people are poor, but convince themselves that the people are slowly rising and that soon things will be fine. They read that the Mexican army can be rough but never grasp the fact that historically the army has been stationed all over the country to repress and terrorize the people of Mexico."

This is participant journalism where the participant is having no fun at all; cheap and ubiquitous drugs only add to the misery, and, as Bowden concludes, "... No one can figure out who controls the violence, and no one can imagine how the violence can be stopped."

And this, Bowden suggests, is the future all of us can expect.

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"What line?" is a question commonly heard in urban Japan, and that's no surprise: train lines play a big part in our urban Japanese existences. Many of us ride the same line every day, and as we ride we notice things about that line, the landscapes through which it moves, the riders we share it with and the Japan that contains all of that. Most of us don't bother to write it down, but, in Tokyo Commute: Japanese Customs and Way of Life Viewed from the Odakyu Line, A. Robert Lee did bother, and in doing so has demonstrated this his line, his journeys on the Odakyu, are a perfect organizing principle for a book about "Japanese customs and way of life," because one sees it all from the train.

One hallmark of a train journey is that things are there, fellow passengers are there, signs are there, and then they're not. Lee captures this in the quick takes he gives us of all that he briefly surveys. Signs filled with surrealistic poetry, women doing their make-up, memories of other trains, talking vending machines . . . the list—the train—goes on.

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This Perry Mason diversion, The Case of the Glamorous Ghost, was more focused on courtroom conniving than speeding around Los Angeles and eating in diners, so though Gardner, a lawyer by trade, does the courtroom stuff well—one almost feels sorry for Hamilton Burger; another open-and-shut case slammed in his face—one misses the period details. Still, Gardner has once again provided first-class entertainment.

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Michael Pronko, who is the indispensable writer in English about jazz in Kanto, gives us, in Motions and Moments (and presumably in the collections that preceded this one), a series of Tokyo moments, captured by a non-Japanese while in motion through the metropolis, because, well, this is Tokyo, after all. Those who know Japan's capital will find themselves nodding in recognition as they read several of the pieces: the one about the incredulous questions one gets about whether one really likes sushi, hot springs, sake, or whatever other Japanese pleasure some Japanese tend to think of as one only they could enjoy; the one about the confusions that arise from the differences in name order between Japanese and English (my students have always called me Cozy, except for those who call me Mr. David); the one about the various reactions—should I go or should I stay?—in the expat community after 3/11 . . . The list could go on. As delightful as they are, even more rewarding for those who've been in Japan for a while are those to which we nod in recognition at a phenomenon we are recognizing for the first time. For me that was, to offer one example, the essay about the importance of parting in Japan, the standing around at the ticket wicket after an evening out with friends saying those final things we didn't quite get to earlier. This is a collection old timers will enjoy as much as nama-gaijin.

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It's interesting to learn from The Case of the Deadly Toy that in the late 50s, when this novel was published, apparently parents worried about their children watching too many "pistol programs," TV shows that featured a great deal of shooting, but would certainly be mild by today's standards. The boy at the center of the case Perry Mason unravels in this novel is an addict of such shows, and becomes obsessed with guns. Not unlike the offpsring of some dimmer parents still with us, this boy is allowed to play with a real pistol, and, it should surprise no one, nothing good comes of that.

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The Case of the Queenly Contestant, the last of the five Perry Mason novels I scored at a California junk shop,was published in 1967, but I'm afraid Perry Mason does not grow his hair, use his tie as a headband, and defend pro bono Vietnam war resisters. Indeed, the odd thing about this series is that from the earliest one I read, published in the '30s, through this one, he and his secretary Della Street don't change at all. The only hint that this novel takes place during the swinging '60s is that Mason uses—and the author notes this—non-dairy creamer in his coffee.

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It's still early in the year, but Those Whom I Would Like to Meet Again is the best book I've read so far, because the author, Giedra Radvilavičiūtė (don't make me type that twice) does something that—although one thinks of Montaigne (if he had written fiction)—seems entirely fresh. Each of the stories in this volume is a mix of autobiography, essay, and story where one form drifts into the next in a way that looks formless, but is nothing short of brilliant. The stories are funny and wistful, and contain sentences that make one stop and shake one's head in admiration (or chuckle out loud). This book is part of Dalkey Archive's Lithuanian Literature Series. So original is the author's style that I can't imagine it is representative, but if it were I would certainly want to read more of the nation's literature.

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A teacher in London has an affair with one of her students. Her "friend" writes about this teacher. Zoë Heller tells these stories, and in so doing gives us a master class in how to write in the voice of an unreliable—in this case even sinister—narrator. Because this narrator is observant, cynical, and acerbic Heller is also able to use this voice to offer telling observations on subjects ranging from education to bourgeois bohemianism. What Was She Thinking?: Notes on a Scandal, along with Heller's The Believers, which I read late last year, convince me that she is one of our best novelists writing realist novels about life in our times.

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I saw the movie "The Big Short" before reading the book. I enjoyed it a great deal, not least for the way the director found artful ways to insert the necessary info-dumps about highly esoteric financial shenanigans that, along with some of the few people who saw past the smoke and mirrors, were the subject of the film. The info-dumps were well done, but at the end of the movie I was still shaking my head trying to figure out what had actually happened. I thought reading the book might help with that, and it did. Now I understand. Sort of. Not really. But what I did grasp is that except for a handful of people, and including the people running Wall Street, nobody else understood what was going on either. The Big Short, however, both book and movie, are as much about the odd and interesting people tossing the millions around as about finance,and that ensures that both book and movie are always engaging.

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Having no Latin and no Greek I don't know how accurate and faithful Robert Fitzgerald's translations are, but I do know, having read his Iliad and Odyssey, and now his Aeneid, that his versions are my Homer, my Virgil. The rhythm of the sentences, the vocabulary, the images that startle just as much as I'm sure they did in Greek and Latin keep one turning pages, hungry for the next delightful turn of event, turn of phrase. There were moments, reading the Aeneid, where I tired a bit of the nation-building agenda that seems to drive it, but these objections were quickly sloughed off and forgotten. So grand is the work that, as with all successful political art, it quickly rises above parochial concerns. I suppose I should look at some of the newer translations of the classics, but I don't suppose I ever will.

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And now, I'll do my best to keep this thread updated.

2dcozy
Mar 21, 2016, 1:29 am

I've always admired polymaths, and George Steiner definitely falls into that category. He berates himself, near the end of his memoir, Errata, for having spread himself too thin, for not having devoted his career to one or two of the big ideas he has written books about before moving on to other things. For me, though, it's precisely his breadth that fascinates, and it is no surprise that the thing he appears least interested in is himself. He devotes very little of this memoir to what he did when and why, but a lot to what he has thought about, studied, and learned. True, there are one or two chapters that begin with sentences like, "During the war years the French Lycée in Manhattan was a cauldron," but most of open with propositions such as: "It is plausible to suppose that the period since August 1914 has been, notably in Europe and Russia, from Madrid to Moscow, from Sicily to the Arctic Circle, the most bestial in recorded history," and proceed from those beginnings in essayistic fashion. Because Steiner is a great mind it is a pleasure to follow his thinking about music, war, place, God, and other topics. I hope that there is still a place in intellectual life for scholars who, like Steiner, decline to devote themselves to a narrow specialty.

3LolaWalser
Mar 21, 2016, 12:14 pm

I read Steiner's Language and silence not that long ago. There's an old-fashioned feel to it but you can't help liking him. And people with vast range of references are always fun to read.

Bowden's reportage on Juarez has indeed been excellent and harrowing.

Oh, Renault... I understand she was one of those curious lesbian misogynistic idolaters of maleness, like Yourcenar or Camille Paglia today.

4dcozy
Abr 6, 2016, 1:35 am

A self-aware Sicilian prince, The Leopard who gives the book its title, in the time of Garibaldi observes the world he has known crumble. Occasionally sad, occasionally furious, he watches for the most part with detachment; his creator, the author, Giuseppe di Lampedusa, views the Prince with humor and affection as he ambles through his life. There is no great action in the book, but Di Lampedusa makes the characters who surround the prince--Sicilians and Northerners, new men and old--human. His compassion for his characters, however flawed they are, reminds one, though the milieu couldn't be more different, of the greatest of all humanist artists, Yasujiro Ozu.

5tomcatMurr
Abr 6, 2016, 10:29 am

good to catch up with your reading, David. (alas, I am woefully behind with writing about mine)

Another Steiner fan here. (I can't remember which critic it was who wrote of Steiner's latest: "Another sonorous performance on the Steinerway" - or words to that effect.) I love his range of reference too, but he can sometimes overdo it.

6dcozy
Abr 20, 2016, 11:52 pm

Zoran Živković: The Last Book

This is the first book in an as yet unpublished trilogy of detective novels by Zoran Živković. Because it is Živković, and tipped off by the title, readers won't be surprised to find that it is bookish and includes elements of fantasy. In this, the first volume, customers of a book store begin to die, though there is no discernible cause of death. The investigations of detective Dejan Lukić reveal that--the fantasy and the bookishness collide--the cause of death may well be a book, the last book, or the book of which the last book is a part. The book reads well on its own, but becomes more interesting after one has read the second in the trilogy and sees how threads begun in the first volume are developed.

7dcozy
Abr 20, 2016, 11:53 pm

Zoran Živković: The Grand Manuscript

The plot thickens as detective Dejan Lukić is called in to investigate the disappearance of a novelist from an apartment that, empty, is locked from the inside and which has no other means of egress. The much anticipated manuscript on which that novelist was at work has also disappeared, and as it may or may not have the power to endow those who read it with immortality, we see that once again Živković's bookish world is fantastic. But then books can endow their characters with immortality, so maybe it's not as fantastic as all that. Like the first book in the trilogy, this book can stand on its own, but it is inextricably connected to the first, and some of the philosophical fun will only be apparent to those who've read both.

8dcozy
Editado: Maio 8, 2016, 2:07 am

Zoran Živković: The Compendium of the Dead

The trilogy concludes in a way that reaffirms the obvious: Zoran Živković is more interested in books and how they are made than in hard-boiled detectives and how they detect. The writer, not Živković, maybe, refers to the books that comprise this trilogy as "vegetarian mysteries," because no one is killed, or if they are they don't stay dead. And yes, this is the kind of book in which in which the author of the book to comment on it. Not for everyone perhaps, but good fun for those who like that sort of thing.

9LolaWalser
Abr 24, 2016, 11:16 am

Zivkovic sounds interesting. How could he not, if it's about books... I think I may have read something by him a million years ago (something sci-fi timey-wimey? There was an old bookish woman in it); will see whether I can find more.

You're inspiring me to jot down a few notes about my own reading. If only because it's sad how much I forget!

10pgmcc
Abr 24, 2016, 11:34 am

>8 dcozy: This sounds very interesting. I am glad you defined vegetarian mysteries as I was under the illusion that no one was eaten in such stories.

11dcozy
Maio 8, 2016, 2:09 am

I remember when books like Oranges are Not the Only Fruit were appearing and readers around me, readers I respected, were excited. Somehow, though I never picked up a Jeanette Winterson novel until now. My loss. The Passion is a superb historical novel, that is superb precisely because it does not foreground the fustian and tedious detail that weigh down much of that genre, but rather is a book that can be read for its beautiful sentences. Set during the Napoleonic wars it weaves together the story of a cook in Napoleon's army and that of a gambler from Venice. One moves eagerly between the two tales, and the delight is only doubled when the story lines come together. Now, to start getting caught up with the rest of Winterson's work.

12dcozy
Maio 8, 2016, 2:10 am

Tim Powers's Medusa's Web is an artful mix of science fiction and Hollywood fiction that will ring true to those of us who have lived in Hollywood, but were not in "the business." Tim Powers gets the landscape right, and that provides a good grounding for the truly other aliens he creates and those aliens' meddling in human affairs, particular the affairs of an odd family in a gothic estate—such places exist—just a few blocks north of Sunset. Unfortunately, and since I read this novel right after Jeanette Winterson's The Passion this was thrown into stark relief, Powers's sentences get the job done, but that is all.

13dcozy
Maio 8, 2016, 2:13 am

It was nice to sit down and not just read the odd Coleridge poem here and there, but to read, in Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Selected Poems several together. One sees, at least in this collection, his Christianity drop away and his gloom increase, and can only speculate on the role opium played in all this. I'm eager now to sit down with the Coleridge biography that's been sitting on my shelf for a decade or so.

14dcozy
Editado: Jun 17, 2016, 6:13 am

The good thing about James Ellroy is that his prose has style, or to be more precise, his prose is other than the approved plain style. The bad thing about Ellroy is that—and this is something that threatens any writer who attempts something other than that safe plain style—his style had become mannered. In the last Ellroy I read, and this was some years ago, it seemed to me that his prose style had become a parody of itself: taut and austere had become all one-sentence paragraphs, one-word sentences, and I tired of it. Further, since his characters walk the same mean streets as Philip Marlowe, it was hard not to draw comparisons. Ellroy came up short in those comparisons, but to be fair, so does pretty much any other writer of this kind of fiction.

But . . . I decided to give him another try. With Perfidia he's launched a new series of novels set in and around Los Angeles. This one takes place during the days just before and after Pearl Harbor, and if the novel has one great strength it his his demystification of the "greatest generation," those sometimes heroic alcoholic racists and bigots about whom, for our sins, we hear so much. Such demystification is more than welcome, and I was so sucked into the labyrinthine scheming of his characters, some of whom, like Bette Davis and Fletcher Bowron, existed off the page, that the style became a non-issue. When I purposely slowed my pace to have a close look at what Ellroy was doing with words I found that he had drifted toward the safe plain style and away from machine gun bluntness, and this did not seem to me to be a bad thing. His prose will never be literary—thank the GSM for that—but it now seems appropriate for the stories he wants to tell.

15dcozy
Jul 9, 2016, 6:05 am

The best biographies are those that illuminate not just a person, but a time, a place, a world. Tom Reiss's The Orientalist is one of those. One reason Reiss is able to use his tremendous skill as a writer and researcher to such good effect is that his subject, Lev Nussimbaum, aka Essad Bey, aka Kurban Said, though a prolific and successful writer in the 1920s, '30s, and 40s, has left in his wake, with the possible exception of his novel, Ali and Nino, none of the grand achievements of the sort that usually attract biographers. Thus the book is more about the world through which this Zelig-like chameleon moved than about the man himself. And that world—from Azerbaijan to Turkey to Paris to Berlin to Positano and beyond—is horrible and fascinating, and wonderful.

Off now to find a copy of Ali and Nino.

16dcozy
Ago 3, 2016, 2:44 am

Employing equal parts pulp, high modernism, and wide ranging intellect, Michael Moorcock is a fascinating and refreshingly unpredictable writer. He is one of those writers who one feels one has to learn how to read afresh with each of his books one picks up. This collection of stories, The Lives and Times of Jerry Cornelius is no exception, with its Dos Pasos like newsreel introductions to each tale, and the fluidity with which Cornelius, a sort of time-travelling James Bond, moves from one temporal and geographic location to the next. The humor—this is a comic apocalypse—is sly, dry, and, one is tempted to say, British. The range of references, historical and political, that define the disasters through which Cornelius moves are illuminated by that humor. The low humor and high seriousness meld to great effect in the concluding tale "Firing the Cathedral," a Moorcockian masterpiece.

17dcozy
Ago 3, 2016, 2:46 am

The Franchise Affair is a typically adept Josephine Tey novel, but one that is atypical in that her usual hero, Inspector Alan Grant, makes only brief appearances, having been upstaged by a provincial lawyer. Tey seems to me a master stylist. Her novels may be entertainments, but her every sentence drips with intelligence.

18tomcatMurr
Ago 4, 2016, 7:29 am

>14 dcozy: interesting analysis of Ellroy's prose style, David. It seems all contemporary writers use this kind of style: they call it sparse, taut, direct. I call it typing.

Ellroy's novels often make nice movies, I find, but I'm still not tempted to try to actually read one of them.

19dcozy
Ago 22, 2016, 9:11 pm

Fog is the dominant environmental motif of this Lew Archer outing, The Chill, and that is not unrelated to the fact that psychology, the human mind, is at the center of the novel. It is interesting to read a novel such as this one from a time before Freudian-inflected psychology was seen, by popular novelists, as something to be made fun of as a matter of course. And the hints that continue to be dropped about Lew Archer's background allow us to continue our ongoing (psycho-?) analysis of the enigmatic detective.

20dcozy
Ago 22, 2016, 9:13 pm

Japanese literature from Okinawa is literature that most of us who read in English—and, one suspects, many who read in Japanese—know nothing about. For that reason alone Islands of Protest is essential. That it is largely literature composed of stories, poems, and a play that are clearly littérature engagée also must be essential to virtually any art emerging from a place that has been, and continues to be, exploited and oppressed to the extent that Okinawa has and is; the work collected in Islands of Protest—note the title—is no exception. The prose, poetry, and drama collected here, however, is uniformly strong enough that it will appeal even to those who feel distant from Okinawan history and struggle. Indeed, it is the most openly engaged of all the work, a play that might be described as political burlesque, "The Human Pavilion" by Chinen Seishin, that is also, in its humor, in its horror, in its slapstick and unexpectedness that is among the most engaging. That another stand-out is Toma Hiroko's poem "Backbone" makes one wish that the selection was a bit more balanced between poetry and prose (200+ pages of prose, ten or so of poetry). Still, to reiterate, the collection is essential to anyone interested in literature and Okinawa.

21LolaWalser
Ago 23, 2016, 9:12 pm

>19 dcozy:

Oh, if you like Freud in your noir, you MUST read Charles Willeford and Jim Thompson! Nobody's making fun of him there. Come to think of it, is there anything Freud fits so well as squeeze-your-innards, chill-your-senses pulp? Twisted psyches, dark secrets, unmentionable obsessions, death wishes, murderous instincts... he basically wrote all the plots!

22dcozy
Set 22, 2016, 1:38 am

Think of all the really great novels about Tokyo by non-Japanese. That's not such an easy task, because when one does start to think about it, it becomes clear that there aren't any. Until, maybe, now. I say "maybe" only because one hesitates to throw around accolades like "great" too cavalierly, but Arturo Silva's Tokio Whip seems to me by far the best work by a non-Japanese about the Japanese capital that I have seen. One reason for this is the form of this novel in which form is very much foregrounded. Silva understands that simple first-this-happened-then-that-happened narratives—and, god forbid, bildungsroman about young people finding themselves in Japan—don't suffice to capture the chaos that overlays the order that conceals more chaos that is Tokyo. There' s a story here, a love story even with a happy ending, but the story is just one thing happening in the city, to Roberta, Lang, and their group of artistic, intellectual friends, and the fragments, the conversations, the descriptions, the guidebook pastiches, and the other goodies of which Tokio Whip is built make for a novel where one doesn't just read about Tokyo, but lives it.

23dcozy
Set 22, 2016, 1:39 am

I picked up Vu Tran's Dragonfish up on a whim at the Halifax airport, and though such whims sometimes pay off, this time I was not so lucky. Although telling a story about Vietnamese refugees in the United States through a hard-boiled noirish lens is potentially interesting, there's no snap to the language, and the meditations on society—and hard-boiled detectives at their best are among our most perceptive and witty observers of society—are banal. Reading the puffery from other readers and critics that adorns this volume it's hard for me to believe I read the same book as those critics.

24dcozy
Out 10, 2016, 5:31 am

Mathias Énard's Zone takes place on a train, or at least emanates from a train where, as our protagonist travels, his mind travels through the violence of our time and previous times. In fact, he has chained to the rack above him a suitcase filled with accounts and evidence of these horrors which he is on his way to Rome to sell. As a member of French intelligence and a former member of a Croatian militia he has been party to some of the atrocities he hopes to sell, and in selling, to escape. Much has been made of Mathias Énard's decision to eschew conventional punctuation and to write his novel as, more or less, one sentence. The novel reads easily, even lacking full stops; it's hard to put it down. The novels I've read this year confirm that the novel is far from dead.

25tomcatMurr
Out 10, 2016, 9:10 am

Well, that's heartening, isn't it. Tokio Whip sounds really interesting, btw.

26dcozy
Nov 8, 2016, 6:02 am

Lew Archer is a World War II vet, the kind of guy who—if he weren't the preternaturally sensitive hard guy that he is—one would expect to be disgusted with the beatniks, soon to become hippies, that were starting to appear in the post-war world. Because he is preternaturally sensitive, and the progeny of an author, Ross Macdonald, who cared about things like disaffected youth and the traumas to which their parents had subjected them, he takes a much more sympathetic approach to the confused youngsters he crosses tracks with in The Far Side of the Dollar. One of the youngsters, it hardly needs to be said, is running with a bad crowd, driven there by his despicable parents, or maybe they're not despicable, or not both of them, and maybe they're not his parents, or not both of them . . . .

Now, back to a remarkable novel with which I'll be spending some time, Alan Moore's Jerusalem.

27dcozy
Nov 20, 2016, 6:24 am

Poetry's complexity assures that it is always fun to think about (and wags might chortle that it's more fun to think about than it is to read). In Ben Lerner's The Hatred of Poetry he thinks about why people do tend to hate the stuff, but that's really just a ruse. He's actually talking about how wonderful poetry, or at least our platonic image of it, is. It's that poetry often falls short of what it, ideally, could be that we hate. Because we don't hate it. In fact, we love the stuff so much, that even if we don't, you know, read it, we are appalled to see it fall short of what we somehow know it should be.

If Lerner were to write about why people really hate poetry it would, I think, focus on another explanation altogether: difficulty. "If poets want to say something, why don't they just say it? Why do they have to complicate it with all those pesky language games." And so on.

28LolaWalser
Nov 21, 2016, 10:56 am

Ha, that reminds me of what someone told me just the other day (we were talking about Leonard Cohen)--it's not poetry people hate, it's the POETS. :)

29dcozy
Nov 29, 2016, 5:09 pm

A fan, knowledgeable about an art form in the way only dedicated fans are, in conversation with a master practitioner of the art in question: that's what Haruki Murakami and Seiji Ozawa have given us in Absolutely On Music, a series of transcribed conversations between the two artists. The combination of the two—fan and master, writer and musician—is ideal. Murakami is knowledgeable enough that the questions he asks Ozawa are intelligent and informed (it will be no surprise to his readers that he is a close and careful listener), but since he is a non-musician who, by his own admission, can barely read a score, they are at the same time, imbued with just enough ignorance of the musician's craft that they elicit answers that are illuminating to those of us who are also fans, and perhaps not as knowledgeable in our enthusiasm as Murakami. Like all good works of this sort it will send readers back to the music the artists discuss, enriched by both Ozawa's knowledge and Murakami's informed enthusiasm.

30dcozy
Nov 30, 2016, 7:14 am

It was nice to have Inspector Grant back in the mix after the last entry, from which he was conspicuously absent. It was also nice that, although there's a bit of gender-bending, or at least transvestitism, in To Love and Be Wise, that neither Grant nor his creator, Josephine Tey, are at all judgemental about it. And the tale is smartly told, garnished with sharp observations and sentences that crackle. My complete Tey for Kindle for a couple of bucks was a great buy.