A novel of unrelenting pain - more than I for one can bear

 OK I gave it all I could and I tip my hat to Douglas Stuart for his extraordinary writing in his much-praised debut novel, Shuggie Bain - a book w/ so many strong points - terrific even horrifying descriptions of working-class living conditions, addictions, idiosyncratic phrasings, familiar tensions and rivalries in the Thatcher era of the closing of the mines and much unemployment in a system that provided little to nothing in support for the down and oppressed - but by about the mid-point of this novel I just cannot take more of the bleakness, the violence, the misery of the characters: addicted mother, absent and spiteful father, mockery and bullying of the young, effeminate eponymous Shuggie. The novel hits the same notes again and again, driving home its message of course and seemingly a perfectly accurate account of a family in a time and place of hardship, but how much must a reader endure w/out a sign of light or life? It's more than I can give this painful book. 

Excellent writing in an unrelieved bleakness in the much-lauded novel Shuggie Bain

 About 100 pp (25%) into Douglas Stuart's much-lauded debut novel Suggie Bain, and will withhold final judgment till at or near the end but to this point I'd say there's much to praise in this novel but also some cautionary words for potential readers may be in order. This novel is depiction of a three-generation, deeply troubled family living in and around the dismal council housing in Glasgow and vicinity in, I think, the 1980s, the height or depth of Thatcherism, as the defunct coal mines with all the mystery and pollution that they bring to the landscape and populace but at least provided plenty of work for unskilled (and some skilled) laborers hover at the edges of the story. The central character (the novel begins w/ his at age about 20 and living in a rented room in Glasgow and apparently getting by through male prostitution), the eponymous Shuggie, cold and lonely and dismal as is just about everything else in the novel - then jumps back to S's childhood moving from place to place, the mother (Agnes) a severe alcoholic and the father (Shug, just to make the narrative that much more difficult) a philanderer who barely provides for the family welfare. Shuggie as a young child seems somewhat protected by his two older half-sibs and, to a lesser extent, by his maternal grandparents. The plot is thin, but that's OK - this is more a story of mood or setting than a conventional novel. The warning I would put forth is that I've seldom read such an unrelenting portrait of poverty and misery and addiction; there's not a glimpse of humor nor of hope. That said, it's still worth reading and Stuart's facility w/ language, dialect, and acute observation - not by any of the characters but by the omniscient author - balances out the miseries of the setting and astonishes w/ various insightful passages and moments; let's call it the exact counterpart to Proust - beautiful writing about people whom we really don't sympathize w/ or even want to know. Whether I stay with this novel or not will depend, I think, on whether there's a positive moment in the next 100 pages - or will it be just unrelenting sorrow, and who needs that right now? 

Disappointed by Ferrante's new novel

 Just a note here to register my disappointment re Elena Ferrante's The Lying Lives of Adults, which in a previous post, based on my reading of an edited version of the first 4 chapters or so that appeared in the NYTimes, I said I looked forward w/ enthusiasm to reading the whole novel. But having read (most of) the novel, I have to sadly say that the best part by far was the first set of chapters, in which the young woman narrator meets her estranged aunt and learns some of her, and her father's, family secrets. Ferrante knows how to put the bone in the throat right away - same with her famous Brilliant Friend series, which begins as the 2 young girls seek to retrieve a lost toy (a doll?) that had made its way to the local Mafia chieftain - but after the narrator meets Aunt Vittoria the colorful and somewhat unbalanced aunt more or less disappears from the narrative and the novel devolves into a, for me, tedious account of the narrator's coming into adulthood, replete w/ moods and emotions familiar to anyone of any gender - questions about one's body, about sexual attraction (and repulsion), dealing w/ betrayal by friends and family unrest - all good material but in my view EF just lays it all out without any truly memorable scenes of high drama or moments of mysterious beauty, just stepping our way through the events of this young woman's life. What a disappointment! 

The Top Ten Books I Read in 2020

 In this strange year of 2020, cut off from the library and not a great fan of reading on line, I devoted most of my reading time to books in my own collection. In fact, near the outset of the pandemic I decided to focus on books that on first (or even 2nd) reading I loved but that I hadn't re-read in at least ten years. Some good news: I was seldom disappointed in my re-reading adventure; almost all of the books that I remember as great held up the standard, though there were a few that I couldn't finish - either I had changed, or the times (sorry, White Noise and A Wild Sheep Chase). In the end, there were more than 15 novels that I re-read this year w/ no disappointment or disillusionment, for this blog I will bring it down to the Top Ten Books I Read in 2020. It would be kind of ridiculous to give a one-sentence summary of each of these, so I will direct curious readers and visitors who would like to know my thoughts on each of these books to the full version of this blog, which has a complete index by author. If you're visiting this blog by your phone, you need to scroll down to the bottom of the screen and click on "view web version" to see the complete archive. Here's my Top Ten:

The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoevsky (1866). Russian

Crossing to Safety, by Wallace Stegner (1987) American 

Death Comes for the Archbishop, by Willa Cather (1927) American 

Love in the Time of Cholera, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1985).  Colombian

The Known World, by Edward P. Jones (2003) American 

Light in August, by William Faulkner (1932) American

The Magic Mountain, by Thomas Mann (1924). German

Mrs Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf (1925). British

Rabbit at Rest, by John Updike (1990) American 

Suite Française, by Irene Nemirovsky. Left unfinished 1942, published 2004. French

OK, so if you've read all of the above, here are some runners' up: The God of Small Things, Out Stealing Horses, The Prisoner (Proust), The Stranger (Camus), A Summons to Memphis, TheTrial (Kafka), plus  one that I read for the first time this year, We, the Accused. 

One of the precursors to the modern novel: Machado's Bras Cubas

 When last I posted on Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (aka Machado) about a year ago I speculated that he may have been influenced by Sterne's Tristram Shandy, but I wondered how much exposure he would have had to European literature. Machado, whose father was a black man descended from emancipated slaves, is today considered one of the great American black writers of the 19th century - though "American" in this case is South American, Brazilian in fact. Having just finished reading Machado's The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas (1881) I learned from the editors' notes that Machado was widely read in many languages and noted himself the influence Sterne had on his work: A confessional narrator, often directly addressing the reader, and a style replete with many comments and insights about the task of writing itself, a self-edited memoir, in which the narrator suggests skipping several chapters (there are about 150 chapters, none longer than 2 pp. - very readable!), in short a precursor of modern (i.e., 20th-century) fiction. In these notes written from the grave the narrator tells his life story, brought up in comfort, falls in love with a young woman from another class, the relationship broken off by his imperious father, and what follows is a lifelong search for love - which he does find in a long and circuitous affair w/ the wife of one of his so-called friends and political allies, but attempts to match him up for matrimony all fail. Late in life he comes across his youthful love and finds her to be a ruin, even her beauty decomposed - and this is perhaps an echo of Sentimental Education, one of the greatest of all 19th-century novels. As the editors/translators, Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson, note, Machado show no sympathy whatsoever for Brazilian slaves or their descendants; his narrator accepts all the privileges and prejudices of his class - though perhaps that's not so strange. Machado was no proselytizer. Best to accept him for what is rather than reject him for what he is not: He is an inventive novelist and an acute observer of the mores of his social class, something always best seen and noted, I think, by one on the outside looking in. 

A stunning story by Paul Theroux worth reading right to the surprising ending

 I've been remiss on some of the recent New Yorker stories - sorry, everyone! - some of which have been pretty good, but I'll get back on track with at least a brief note on Paul Theroux's story Dietrologia. Yes, you have no idea what the title means, nor do I, but it fits w/ the story in a weird way. The story focuses on an older man, let's say in his 70s at least?, who enjoys his most-days visit from three neighborhood children; he tells them long and pointless tales and introduces them to some arcane vocabulary (hence, the title) and it's obvious that they don't understand much of what he's telling them, but they do like it that he's a soft touch on giving them cookies. His wife discourages his meeting with the children and focuses on selling their small house (it seems to be in Hawaii?) and moving them into some kind of assisted living - he needs it far more than she, and she comes across poorly this story. OK, so all the description up to this point make it seem as if this is a sweet Hallmark Channel movie about a man who gets a renewed sense of life through the wondrous eyes of children etc., but, no, that's a complete misreading, as Theroux pulls the strings in the last few paragraphs and the story becomes a stunning and surprising narrative, which I will not give away except to say that if you're thinking a ha, the old man is abusing the children you're wrong. Worth reading to the end! 

Excellent depiction of the life (and death) of a homeless man in contemporary Japan

 I feel two ways about Yu Miri's 2014 brief novel, Tokyo Ueno Station (tr Morgan Giles, 2019). On the one hand, Miri - well-known in Japan but just being recognized and lauded in the U.S. - does a great job presenting the life story of the narrator, an older Japanese man who has lived with hardship across the span of his life, mostly living apart from his wife and 2 children as he worked at various manual-labor jobs to keep his family just above the poverty level, faced with sorrow later in life as his son dies unexpectedly and eventually leaves his family and takes up his final years living among the homeless in the large Tokyo Ueno park. She tells his life story in clear, exacting detail and never becomes lachrymose or sentimental; his life, and in particular his life among the homeless, helps us see as few other novels have what it's like trying to survive in such circumstances - faced w/ the bitter elements, random attacks by hooligans, occasional eviction notices from the police (clear the park of all your belongings until a set date/time in the future so as not to disturb the emperor on a visit to the park museums), the cold, the rain and snow, illness, and just the need for warmth and comfort. We see that the homeless are not necessarily suffering w/ addiction or mental illness and not nobody would select this type of life by choice. Interestingly, there's a community of fellowship among the homeless, at least for the most part. Ideally, this novel will help all readers see the life of a homeless man in a new and more sympathetic manner. All that said, why the hell did Miri have to make the narrative so confusing? We figure out quickly - and I'm not giving much away (the NYT story this week on Miri gave away this point in the subhead) by saying that the narrator is a "ghost" who tells his life story from somewhere beyond. OK, fair enough, but why be so ambiguous and confusing about the end, and why the circuitous narrative pathway? Additionally, most American readers will be put off, as was I, by the many Japanese place names, which mean nothing to me but give the novel an exotic veneer - do we need to know the names of all the subway lines?, do we need such detail on the Shinto mourning rites? So in a way, the novel, or at least the translation, could be more friendly to non-Japanese readers just through some simple editorial decisions. But I guess Miri might like the place names for the incantatory effect, much like the prayer litanies that she includes. As a portrait of a homeless man, this novel is excellent, but I wish it had been more straightforward in its narrative development, which at times feels out of control or random.