The ten best works of fiction I read in 2022

 The Ten Best Works of fiction I read in 2022: 

Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya (1898)

Inspired by the play-within-a-play in the film Drive My Car, I re-read Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, one of his 4 late-life plays, and was blown away by its beauty and pathos - as audiences (and readers) have universally for a century - the essence of what’s considered Chekhovian: adults living their late life in a provincial setting, a sense that their lives were of great promise that has never materialized; many missed connections among the unmarried, who are generally on the cusp marital eligibility, time has passed them by, and secret longings are never realized or recognized much less consummated, bursts of violence and remorse. (See also: Three Sisters, The Cherry Orchard, The Seagull)

George Eliot. Scenes of Clerical Life (1857)

There’s a long way to from here to Eliot’s masterpiece, Middlemarch; that said, there are in this short many of Eliot’s insights and apercus - plus some sharp-witted addresses to the reader, all of which will sustain her throughout her career. (See also Middlemarch, Daniel Deronda) 

Lion Feuchtwanger. The Oppermanns (1933) 

This novel has to rank among the greatest (if lesser known) grand 19th-century novels that conveys a great movement in history as seen through a group lens - usually a number of family members, each affected by the change and upheaval taking place around them, and their dawning awareness - or oblivion to and denial of - the change that is gradually becoming universal: e.g., Buddenbrooks of course, also The Leopard, Lucky Per, maybe A Fine Balance, maybe Lonesome Dove, 100 Years of Solitude, The Makioka Sisters, and let’s not forget Middlemarch. What makes The Oppermanns stand out even more among this august group of novels is that Feuchtwanger was writing even as the events - the Nazi takeover of the government of Germany under the leadership of the man called in this book always The Leader - took place all around him.

Annie Ernaux. The Years (2008)

I was blown away and deeply moved by the beauty and intelligence of this novel, which I took up with some trepidation but thought I’d like to check out the latest Lit Nobelist of whom I’d never heard - the Nobelists haven’t rung the bell pretty much since the Dylan surprise of ’16. But here this surprise work comes along, so smart, so insightful, and so accessible.

Graham Greene. A Burnt-Out Case (1960)

This Greene novel follows Querry (note the homonym), a lost soul, highly intelligent, a bit acerbic, self-destructive - in this case a renowned architect (of churches primarily), famous on the order of, say, Frank Lloyd Wright, who gives up his profession/vocation and journeys aimlessly up an unnamed river in central Africa - shades of Conrad here, obviously - and we find him at the terminus of the river ferry days or even weeks upstream at what we (and he) soon learn is a leper colony staffed by a medically skilled team of (mostly) Catholic priests. Query decides to stay, and he helps out, to some degree. (See also The Quiet American, Brighton Rock, The Power and the Glory) 

Shirley Hazzard’s The Bay of Noon (1970) captures a time and place like too few contemporary novelists. It lacks the humor and irony (or sarcasm) of some of Hazzard’s earlier writing, in particular the novel and stories built on her experiences working at the UN in the ‘50s; but it is in tune with some of her short fiction about Americans in Italy in mid-century. I can’t help but think that Hazard would be much better recognized and more often read today had she set more of her fiction in the U.S. (or London). (See also Collected Stories, The Great Fire, Cliffs of Fall) 

Julia May Jonas. Vladimir (2022) 

Vladimiar must have been the success de scandale of the year, maybe the century, at Skidmore College, the thinly veiled setting. So there’s lots to enjoy here, lots of insight into the character of a middle-aged woman desperately seeking to retain and rekindle the allure of her youth, some great skewering of academic politics, and all in not much more than 100 pp.

Per Petterson’s first work, Echoland (1989) has finally been published in English and it’s obvious that this guy would be a real talent - beautiful passages (a night-time fishing expedition, an exuberant bike ride on fitted nearly deserted roads, family waking up in early hours nearly dead because of propane leak, first realization of sexual urges, complicated relationships with domineering dad and a demanding grandfather, puzzlements about his friend’s attraction to older sister. (See also Out Stealing Horses) 

Jean Rhys. Wide Sargasso Sea (1966)

The writing is at times quite beautiful, esp in Rhys’s evocation of the look and feeling of the tropical Windward Island, in its beauty, danger, isolation - in particular the subtle and mean interaction of the proud English landowner and the slave/servant population, on the verge or just past the verge of outright revolt.

A.B. Yehoshua. The Lover (1977)

This early work by Israeli writer boy the great Israeli novelist, who died in 2022, and possibly his first translated into English is a really excellent novel and a great intro to Yehoshua’s interests and style. (See also Mr. Mani, Open Heart, A Woman in Jerusalem) 

December 2022: George Eliot's first novel, A.B.Yehoshua, and a great work from the 2022 Literature Nobelist, Annie Ernaux

 George Eliot’s first book of published fiction, Scenes of Clerical Life (1857), a collection of 3 substantial stories each concerned with the relationships - monetary, familiar, amorous, and obviously religious - in small, rural English villages at about 1800 or so (I think). There’s not a bit of nostalgia here; the village life is full of gossip, contentious relationships, animosity, and inequity. We can see in these stories Eliot’s emerging style - acerbic, highly literary, with the occasional metaphor or point of observation that just pierces threader and demands a 2nd look. It’s not yet Middlemarch, Eliot’s master work, but we see the foreshadowing. What’s missing, what she developed in her later style was the ability incorporate and motivate a plot; the character in these 3 stories are far less vivid and complex than later Eliot characters: Each of a type, and the type doesn’t change much or evolve over the course of the work. All the stories including a significant death element; in the first w, that element is more of the pathetic sort - plus a story of love gone wrong and succumbing the family pressure, much like the romantic fiction that Eliot sought to avoid in her choice of a masculine nome guerre. The highlight by far is the final story in the trilogy, where Eliot boldly takes on themes alien to the highly masculine world, at that time at least, of literary fiction, notably drug addiction, alcoholism, and spousal abuse - more than a century ahead of her time. 

A.B. Yehoshua’s early novel A Late Divorce (1982) is a rarity in his work, one of the novels of his that in my view just ran out of gas and got away from him. The main reason to tackle this dense doesn’t work though his experiments with narrative bore fruit in his later work, notably Mr. Mani - maybe his best novel and known for its narrative construction in which the whole story is told from the point of view of a single speaker with his or her respondent must just be surmised from the surrounding - a dialog posing as a monolog. He does the same thing in Divorce none section, but the effect is to put a strain on the reader. This is a novel in 6 long (50+ pp) sections, each from a different POV but following a straight-along 3 (or so) days of plot line; in essence, a father/grandfather who some years back had left his wife (she had tried to stab him to death and is now in a psychiatric hospital) to seek her signature on a divorce decree - and story draws on his three children, their spouses/lover, his grandchildren, ex-wife, and several peripheral characters. This novel cannot support this abundance of characters and events and collapses under its own weight - esp. for American readers who will be puzzled by the many names and nicknames and abbreviated names and the frequent changes in locale - it’s much like the grand Russian novels in this, and a “cast of characters” at the outset would help. Obviously, ABY is indebted as well to Faulkner - the novel opens with an attributed quote from Faulkner - particularly in its use of multiple narrators or points of view esp in Sound/Fury. So in  short for ABY readers, such as me, this novel is worth a look, but it’s a big time absorber of mental space for readers new or indifferent to him 

I was blown away and deeply moved by the beauty and intelligence of Annie Ernaux’s The Years (2008) - a book I took up w/ some trepidation but thought I’d like to check out the latest Lit Nobelist of whom I’d never heard - the Nobelists haven’t rung the bell pretty much since the Dylan surprise of ’16. But here this surprise work comes along, so smart, so insightful, so accessible. If one had to classify this work it could maybe be called a work of autofiction - Ernaux’s depiction in some 240 pp. of the span of her life, mostly spent in France, Paris esp in her adulthood, a full-time teacher in a lycée (high school) and later a prof in a college ed dept - but still she writes a slew of books, perhaps picking up the pace in her retirement. As the title suggests, this covers the span of her life -but it’s not exactly a memoir; in fact, it’s an autobio w/out using the word “I” - it’s the story of the evolution of the world in which she lives/we live or have lived, and full of such odd insights and observations that the only close counterpart might be Proust - but AE’s case without the stylistic flourishes. Anyone whose life span is remotely close to AE’s can recognize him/her/their self, or world, in which and of which she writes - entirely in short, clear sentences, each passage an essay in and of itself. Toward the end she discusses this writing project directly: “She would like to assemble these multiple images of her self, separate and discordant, thread then together with the story of her existence, starting with her birth…up until the present day.” She succeeds. Some readers may be a bit stumped by her observations on French politics; never mind that, skip past the Mitterands and the Le Pens et al and get what you can from the rest, including trenchant and timely passages on immigrants, on Sept 11th, popular culture, on hypermarkets and capitalism, on it goes - a remarkable work that pushes the boundaries of genre. 

November 2022:Yehoshua's The Lover, Greene's The Shipwrecked, Eliot's Scenes of Clerical Life, and The Oppermanns

 Elliot's Reading - November 2022

The Lover (1977) is and early work by Israeli writer A.B. Yehoshua and possibly his first translated into English (?), is a really excellent novel and a great intro to ABY’s interests and style. It’s really quite long - -350- pp. but a font using a minuscule style, thanks a lot Harcourt Brace and it’s told in a series of personal voices - 5 main characters and smattering of minor ones - so we’re going from speaker to speaker and sometimes of scenes covering the same ground, a style that could be annoying in the hands of others but honestly ABY’s great skill at maintaining a narrative and establish a character’s voice and milieu that there’s no problem in following the story line and in watching the characters grow and develop; at times toward the end ABY’s style is (intentionally) a recollection of Faulkner and Joyce - exalted company if you ask me. Yet there’s nothing pretentious about the story - it’s easy to follow and offers a great insight into life in the multi-linguistic, multi-faith populace that feels both ancient and contemporary. In brief the story line: A young man (Gabriel) who had been living with a Haifa family, enters the Army during the 2nd War (I think) and disappears: did he die in combat? Did he desert? The head of the family (Adam, aha!) who runs a highly successful car-repair company, sets out to find out the fate of Gabriel, in a long search that takes him across military lines and across much of the land of Israel - in a plot that also involves his teen daughter and his wife (who’d had an affair with Gabriel - this does not seem to bother Adan in his quest, which is one of the few flaws in the novel) and, most consequently, Na’im, a teenage Arab boy who works in Adam’s garage and plays a pivotal role in the chase for Gabriel. In each of ABY’s novels he seems to don a cloak of expertise in a different field - in this one, auto repair in particular: How does he know, or lean, so much about so many different skills and occupations (in later novels, more tilted toward the arts: classical harpist, film director …)? How does he know so much and wear it so lightly? That’s part of the pleasure of reading ABY: His ease with such a wide range of skills lends credence to every other aspect of his writing. This is not a perfect novel, as several key elements are established but never resolved (most notably a highly troubling affair involving a friend of Adam’s daughter), but it’s a striking, memorable piece - an announcement to the literary world that here’s a new guy with whom to reckon. 

The Shipwrecked is an early Graham Greene novel in which he was working out some new material - good! - but has a # of flaws that have kept it more or less underground. It was first issued in 1935 and was a complete failure; initial title: England Made Me. Reprinted some 20 years later under the banner: The Shipwrecked. Neither title tells us anything we need to know about the work itself, which begins w/ a meeting between a career-woman (Kate) and her woefully incompetent dashing twin brother (Anthony) - Kate lands him a job at her company, which seems a lot like a behemoth investment conglomerate such as Berkshire Hathaway, with the stink, however, of bending the rules to advantage. It turns out, improbably, that Kate is to get married to the head of the conglomerate; things, therefor, look promising for Anthony, but when he witnesses some shifty trading, faming of a second-tier associate, brutal beating of a man who crossed the line Anthony’s had enough and says (improbably) that he intends to moved to the U.S. and marry a trashy showgirl he’d met at the Rivoli gardens. So there’s a lot of plot material here, but in this instance the dough never rises: We don’t know or care enough about Anthony’s fate, nor can we look back sympathetically from our 21st century on Kate’s using sexual favors to advance in the corporation. That said, there are some find passages never the less - notably a great description of an early airline flight and a good meditation on the observations one make when traveling by train. 

Scenes of Clerical Life (1857) was George Eliot’s (Mary Ann Evans’s) first published book of fiction; it consists of 3 sections, each of which is what today we’d consider to be of novella (short fiction)-length or even a novel. We turn to this work with its unenticing title for insight into the writer Eliot was to become. I read just the first section, and will probably come back to the latter 2. The first section - which tells of a rural English minister whose wife takes in to share their domicile an exotic (for rural England) lady, the Countess, which leads to much gossip about the stress this must put upon the husband-wife relationship. Rumors develop end fly - but then tragedy hits the family and the townsfolk feel guilty and admonished for their nasty supposition. There’s a long way to from here to Eliot’s masterpiece, Middlemarch; that said, there are in this short seaman many of Eliot’s insights and apercus - plus some sharp-witted addresses to the reader, all of which will sustain her throughout her career. What this work lacks, however, is a sense of narrative: We get numerous dinner-table conversations and introduction to a lot of characters, but it’s hard to find a driving force in this work - a lot of chatter, but the characters are not faced with crucial life decisions and their consequences; they characters, some of them, may suffer - but not because of their doings and the failures. As Eliot matures as a fiction writer, this will change. 

Lion Feuchtwanger’s novel The Oppermanns (1933) has to rank among the greatest (if lesser known) grand 19th-century novels that conveys a great movement in history as seen through a group lens - usually a # of family members, each affected by the change and upheaval taking place around them, and their dawning awareness - or oblivion to and denial of - the change that is gradually becoming universal: e.g., Buddenbrooks of course, also The Leopard, Lucky Per, maybe A Fine Balance, maybe Lonesome Dove, 100 Years of Solitude, The Makioka Sisters, and let’s not forget Middlemarch. What makes The Oppermanns stand out even more among this august group of novels is that LF was writing even as the events - the Nazi takeover of the government of Germany under the leadership of the man called in this book always The Leader - took place all around him (I think he was in exile in Switzerland when he completed this novel?, not sure haven’t yet read the brief intro to this intelligently edited (helpful rather than pedantic or condescending footnotes, e.g.); the novel has the vividness of journalism and long perspective of literature. In essence we follow the lives of various members of the O family and several friends/neighbors as the Nazi (Nationalist) party flourishes and there’s one attack or indictment of the Jewish community after another, as many of the characters refuse to recognize the changes in their beloved country, unable to give up their prosperity, fantasizing that this too shall pass - it’s only a phase, only a small # of Germans, etc. - as their world collapses into death and exile. Nobody could read this today and not make analogies between the growing, leadership inspired hatred and oppression that we have seen, are seeing, in our own country: We all are Oppermmans! No doubt the novel gets a bit disentangled and frayed on the cuffs at the end: How could LF possibly bring this novel to a conclusion in 1933 as anything but death in obscurity or a false hope; ending aside, though, the O’s is a completely engaging, informing, and sadly familiar nearly a century after its publication. Langth aside (+500 pp) this novel deserves a much wider readership. 

October 2022: Graham Greene novels. Cormac McCarthy and Thomas McGuane stories, Eliz. Strout, Banana Yoshimoto, a note on Bob Dylan

 Elliot's Reading - October 2022

You can tell fro Graham Greene’s first novel, The Man Within (1929), that he was a writer on the path to a great career, although what type of career may not have been immediately evident. The novel, in essence, is the tale over a few days of a man (Andrews) who had been involved in smuggling (from France to England) of whiskey (his father’s profession, and one to which he was not well suited) who turns on this crew - a highly dangerous thing to do esp in that the entire justice system of the coastal town is dependent in one way or another on the illegal trade. The novel opens with Andrews running in fright from the vengeful crew when he gains entry from a sympathetic woman, Elizabeth, who shelters him - and with whom he falls in love. A crime story? A love story? Something more? Less? First of all readers will note the many philosophical and psychological passages, and will also note that there’s relatively little space given to the more exciting scenes - the chase through fog, the flight from the town after the men are acquitted in trial, guarding the house and Elizabeth as the vengeful troop approaches in the dark night - while a lot of space is that of Andrews and his meditation about his love, his cowardice, his competence. So the novel in some sense is neither fish nor foul, way to meandering in its structure to appeal as a crime novel, but as a work of psychological insight it’s hampered by the improbability of most of the action (e.g., how can we in any way believe in his love for Eliz. and hers for him over a period of 2 or 3 days?). The novel could have been tightened and trimmed to half its length at no great loss - but we can see, throughout, the intelligence and wide range of knowledge of the narrator, and hence (though less probably) of Andrews. In the brief preface to the Penguin paperback edition Greene writes disparagingly of this early novel; for Green fans, it’s worth reading, for others, not so much. 

I have no complaint against novelists who set their work in the present and go all out to be timely and relevant - so long as what they write provides us with some fresh information, some drama, some feeling, some style. I do have a problem w/ the usually reliable Elizabeth Strout’s latest in her Lucy saga, Lucy by the Sea (2022), which begins at the outset of the pandemic and, through the first half of this novel, which is as far along as I traveled, follow Lucy as, prompted by her ex-husband, William, gets ushered to a somewhat spacious seaside rental on the coast of Maine. One problem: everything she writes here about the dawning awareness of the lethality of Covid, the initial denial, the warnings and promptings by her ex, the sense of isolation, the fear of the unknown - all so familiar to all readers, to lacking in surprise and wonder, and therefor of little interest, at least to me. This novel should be put into time capsule so that when our grandchildren open the cache readers will have a sense of what life was like back when in the ‘20s. Among other problems: Nothing really happens to Lucy “on stage.” All the the drama takes place among her offspring, about whom she frets and with good reason: divorce, illness, back choices, etc. A novel needs something to happen to and by and for the protagonist (in this case, the narrator): Something dramatic in Lucy’s life, that is. For example, she develops a nodding acquaintance w/ one of the locals, an elderly man whom she suspects may have put a “Yankees go home” placard on her car. Did he do so? I can tell you that nothing on this score develops in the first 125 of so pp., and M tells me that toward he end the man briefly apologizes. That’s it? Come on. And Lucy’s relationship w/ her ex - well nothing happens in the first half, for sure, and whatever connection is made later - there is one, I am told - is of little interest or importance at that point (William is no prize). I could go on. But I have to suppose that Strout is of sufficient stature -  well deserved - that no work of hers will be turned down, ever, and readers may often feel comfortable w/ her style - relaxed and informal, if sometimes forced (many phrases such as “what I’m trying to say is…” so, hey, you’re a writer, just say it!). There have been several other “plague novels”: 

Blindness, the Decameron - and they generally succeed when the plague itself is almost like a character, a horror, effecting all, or when the plague stands for some other condition, e.g., Camus’ Plague and its sociopolitical repercussions. Strout’s have neither, but what can I say? Reviews have been glowing, though I can’t help feeling that Strout can do better. She has done better. 

I may be wrong, probably am, won’t be the first time, but it seems to me that most of the Thomas McGuane stories I’ve read in the New Yorker have been about the lives of Montana immigrants or about Montanans who have made their small fortunes in the service of the arriving waves of settlers - the real-estate agents, attorneys, et al. who had once been peripheral to the life of the far west and have become central players. TM’s story, Kae Half, Leave Half, in the current New Yorker seems a departure for him - a story about two guys who’d been friends since boyhood and who over time follow their love of the rugged outdoors and become ranch hands - a totally non glamours and non prosperous type of work but deeply satisfying to these two adventuresome sorts, until. … It’s a really good about Westerners whose lives have been romanticized and glamorized when in fact it’s difficult and dangerous and hasn’t changed greatly since the days of the cattle drives. 

Graham Greene’s novel A Burnt-Out Case (1961), which could apply to any of several characters in the novel, came right after a string of his most famous novels, including The Power and the Glory, The Heart of the Matter, The End of the Affair, and The Quiet American,  and it’s overshadowed by these, perhaps rightfully, though it’s still a novel worth reading - typical Greene central figure, Querry (note the homonym), a lost soul, highly intelligent, a bit acerbic, self-destructive - in this case a renowned architect (of churches primarily), famous on the order of, say, Frank Lloyd Wright, who gives up his profession/vocation and journeys aimlessly up an unnamed river in central Africa - shades of Conrad here, obviously - and we find him at the terminus of the river ferry days or even weeks upstream at what we (and he) soon learn is a leper colony staffed by a medically skilled team of (mostly) Catholic priests. Q decides to stay, and he helps, to some degree, with patient care and with sketching out plans for a new hospital on site. Eventually, a world-weary journalist discovers Querry in exile and writes a profile, which brings Q unwanted attention. Much of the novel involves debate and discussion about faith and belief; Q of course is resistant and insists he is note devout, though we have our doubts - and he resists all efforts to gothic to announce his faith. He also gets entangled with the wife of a palm-oil magnate who provides the colony with its fuel - and finds himself accused, unjustly, of having sex with extremely naive and immature young woman - leading to a final crisis and to complete misunderstanding of his life. The novel is dark and gloomy, though w/ touches of sarcastic humor - typical of GG - and it’s frightening in its account of the dreadful disease and the risks and discomfort of those who run the colony: will remind some of Naipaul’s African novels (e.g. Bend in the River) and of much more recent work from Theroux on theme of fateful visit to leper colony. 

Not one but two sizable excerpts from forthcoming books in yesterday’s NYT; first, in the Arts and Leisure section, 4 full pages of Cormac McCarthy’s The Passenger. CMcC has become a member of the top tier of living American writers, lauded by lovers of literary fiction, lovers of Westerns, and lovers of adventure yarns - and a man w/ a distinct enigmatic style, obviously deeply influenced by Hemingway, the tough dialect and exterior, the glancing conversation in which characters address one another only obliquely.  The except in the Times, particularly the first half, was a taut, exciting adventure among divers tasked with pulling up the remains from a multi-fatal plane crash. I would read more of this! But the accompanying story about CMcC dissuaded me from even trying: 800 pp? Much of which is about particle physics? Props to the author for knowing so damn much and exploring this esoterica in what will probably be his last work of fiction (he’s 89!) but I don’t think I could make my way in any such narrative short of giving it my life. Then, in the NYTBR, there was an excerpt from Bob Dylan’s The Philosophy of Modern Poetry, a title he must have chosen as the most boring and conventional work of the year; it virtually sends the message “don’t read this boo”; it sounds like a course-catalog entry for a course you wouldn’t take. Except that it’s Dylan - so - I’ll probably someday give it a look - it’s a series of short appreciations by Dylan of presumably the songs most important to him (none by him, I believe); unfortunately, the two pieces excerpted here did nothing for me  and worry that these may be a set of castoffs from his erstwhile radio show. I’d love to know his real thoughts on these songs, but the 2 excerpted looked strange - quick takes rather than thoughtful essays and analysis. I’ll someday leaf through the book and see if his riffs on songs I know will ring more truly. 

To say that I’m not the target readership for Sarah Thahkam Mathews’s NBA fiction finalist, All This Could Be Different, would be a bit of an understatement - yet I do enjoy reading novels and stories that are far from my life and experiences - as any quick glance over recent posts on this blog will evince - but said characters and communities must have some reason for being to get my interest and commitment to the work. STM’s (unnamed?) narrator (and I suspect there will be other narrators - I’ve stopped about 25% into the novel) is of Indian descent, Queer, 20-something, has a job that she doesn’t like though it pays well, in the not-often-written-about city of Milwaukee, whose small size, esp in the Qureer community, allows for many meetups that in NYC, for ex., would be highly improbable. This is to say that her novel rings many bells - but what it doesn’t have, at least for me, is a driving force: Something problem or crisis that the narrator or central character experiences, something he or she or they much overcome, a crisis, a revelation - + a fully realized back story can be good, too - but by p. 80 or so we have experienced none of these, other than a slowly blooming relationship developing between narrator and Black Queer friend and much drinking, pick-ups, mild intoxicants, and self-described “sluttish” behavior that would be ridiculed if acted out among White males - in short, lives seemingly going nowhere, opportunities wasted, crises averted. Good fortune to STM but I concede that this work was not meant for me. 

Dead-End Memories, the collection of 5 short stories from the prolific Japanese author Banana (yes, that’s her published name; is it a pen name?) Yoshimoto (2003, but first English tr. 2022, Asa Yoneda), has some of the strange, sometimes supernatural style sometimes reminiscent of her contemporary Murakami, but with more of a focus on young women and often tragic family life. There’s some pretty gruesome material in this book: a poisoning, a double-suicide, a rape, child neglect - but the mood is not as dark as it may seem from these instances. The characters narrating these stories triumph over their adversity, though not unscathed. The best story to me in this collection is the final story, the title story in fact, in that it’s about a woman suffering from betrayal by her fiancé - a brutal shock to her, but one that she recovers, at least so it seems, and gets on with her life. We feel deeply sorry for her - and for all of the protagonists, narrators, and victims in this collection. BY is difficult to categorize, and her elliptical style may be difficult for American fans of the short story; they’re more quiet and acquiescent in their tone - for ex., the woman who’s a victim of a random act of internal food poisoning is more upset by her outburst of anger the presence of a professor who pesters her with a string of questions about her ordeal than she is at the co-worker who poisoned the cafeteria food. Does that say something about the Japanese temperament, or is it a quirk of BY’s style? In any event, the stories are compact and well-crafted, the translation seems really good (AY even uses “nauseated” correctly!), and it’s a good introduction to BY’s works, albeit from nearly two decades ago 

Elif Batuman's The Idiot and Shirley Hazzard's The Great Fire

 Elliot's Reading - September 2022

Elif Batuman’s debut novel, The Idiot (2017) - not Dostoyevsky’s, but all readers likely to read this novel get the joke& feel smart having done so - proves one thing: She’s really smart and so are most Harvard undergrads. Did you need this novel to tell you that? EB makes clear from the outset that she’s a super student - tallying all or most of her “semi-autobiographical” (read: autobiographical) freshman courses, all of which she seems to cruise through with minimal sleep and dubious nutrition. This is by no means the typical remembrance of syllabi past - as her point seems to be not that Harvard is hard going but that it’s easy going, academically - and the typical woes of such a novel involve for the most part drinking, rx, and sex - all of which are missing in the first half of the novel (as far as I’ll get with it). There’s really no notable tension - there’s a guy with whom the narrator is in love w/ from the start - but he’s a graduating senior (sigh) and, most strangely he seems to want to spend a lot of time w/ narrator although he makes it clear that he has a girlfriend and seems to show no sexual interest in the narrator whatsoever. Aside from that strange romance there no tension, crisis, obstacle in the novel, just observations and quips, many of what are really shrewd and funny. Take this for example: “The dining halls were open late for exam period. At a table near the door, two students were slumped over their books, either asleep or murdered. In a corner, a girl was staring at a stack of flash cards with incredible ferocity, as if she were going to eat them.: But such observations are not enough to carry a novel that is painfully short on conflict, crisis - it’s a Bildungsroman without the “bild.”  

Shirley Hazzard’s last (?) novel, The Great Fire (2003), at its best is exemplary of SH’s literary style: thoughtful, dense, intelligent, yet frustrating as she willfully refuses to guide the reader: a confusing array of characters many of whom go by several different names - she just doesn’t guide you at all as if she wishes her style to demand a close reading, which it does. I found myself frequently re-reading passages, even sentences, to get their full force and significance and, to her great credit, the re-reading always pays off: She’s smarter than her readers or at least than this one. Try this: “He worked late at his notes, and at midnight looked over a Japanese lesson, rereading hew sounds in undertones. At this stage, competence appeared an exciting impobability, which he went to sleep pondering.” The novel set in postwar (1947) Japan (mostly, with intervals in Hong Kong, England, New Zealand…) among mostly former British soldiers in Japan as part of the Occupation. The main character, Leith, is preparing a study of life in post-war Japan. Honestly, I wished for more about his work; I though this would be a novel in the spirit of Forster’s Passage to India, about cultures in collision. As it happens, this theme is never developed after an initial start (in Hiroshima!) and the novel becomes more Conradian, about the drift of rootless characters across the seas of Asia - but mostly among themselves. The biggest problem in The Great Fire, however, is that over the course of the narrative we find ourselves immersed in a love story: Leith falls in love with the beautiful by all accounts Harriet - who is I think precisely half his age - he 34 and she 17, and a young and inexperienced 17 at that. I found their whole relationship creepy and unlikely to succeed, with Leith’s gushing, effusive missives to her from across the globe just putting me on edge. Sorry. Much to like here - I finished reading it, which is rarely the case these days! - but to without a sense of uneasiness, the sense that Hazzard was working unfamiliar ground here (I missed the sharp, satiric wit of her earlier fiction such as Cliffs of Fall) and never quite drew the various strands together. 

Shirley Hazzard's The Bay of Noon, Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea, Yehoshua's The Retrospective, and a '64 Dylan interview

Erin Swan’s debut novel, Walk the Vanished Earth (2022), has so much going for it that I hate to be a spoilsport and note that it’s just not the right novel for me; I’m pretty much dedicated to literary fiction in the realist or naturalist mode - and ES does include many long passages in her novel that fit the bill - notably her devastating account of how mental illness (caused by abusive trauma, or so it seems half-way through the novel) can stalk a family. The central character in this novel is a young man, abandoned by his mother at birth, raised in various foster homes and institutions, who age 30 or so reconnects with his mother, who is alone and severely disabled by her illness.This part of the novel stands on its own - harrowing. Swan, however, is nothing if not ambitious - totally admirable, esp for a young novelist - and includes several other narrative lines - one in 19th-century on the Great Plains, and other some 50 years or so into the future, with three people - two men and a preteen woman - living in an outpost on Mars. Yipes! ES does all she can to make these sections credible, and as we read deeper in we see some of the connecting strings that tie the narratives together - but for me the very aspects that make this novel so distinct were for me the biggest drawbacks. That said, writing is so clear and thoughtful, Swan’s imagination in bounteous, and i think this would be a great book for readers interested in speculative fiction and with a high tolerance for vivid accounts of mental illness and anguish. 

Shirley Hazzard’s 1970 novel, The Bay of Noon (great book, lousy title that refers to nothing particular in the narrative) is in outline a pretty straightforward small-cast drama: Adult narrator (Jenny) references back to her life as a 20-something in ca.1957 (the Sputnick/Space Race era) when she was assigned by the U.S. Govt. to be on the staff for a massive report on some issue, not even sure it it’s ever ID’d, with a large team deployed to the still war-ravaged Naples. During her time there she befriends an older Italian couple - she a writer, he a film director - who become the lens through which she sees and absorbs the culture around her; she also has a relationship of some sort - it doesn’t seem to have been sexual, although that could just be the narrator’s demure nature - with a young Canadian man assigned to the same project. Over time she is betrayed by these so-called friends - and then takes up w/ the now jilted man - Gianni - as they start a relationship of their own, until it’s time for her to sail away - to America! - and he drifts off the resume his relationship with the other woman (Giaconda) - followed by a short where-are-they-now epilog. What makes this novel great, however, is not the plot but the wise observations and insights of the narrator, which is to say of SH, who has her own, sometimes quite difficult, way of convey her observances and impressions of everyone and everything around her - the city still in ruins, the beauty of some the seascapes (which the narrator notes from her1970 vantage have been ruined by development). This book does not benefit from a quick reading; rather, you have to pause at almost every sentence to take in what Jenny/SH are saying, seeing, feeling. She captures a time and place like too few contemporary novelists. This novel lacks the humor and irony (or sarcasm) of some of SH’s earlier writing, in particular the novel and stories built on her experiences working at the UN in the ‘50s; but it is in tune w/ some of her short fiction about Americans in Italy in mid-century. I can’t help but think that SH would be much better recognized and more often read today had she set more of her fiction in the U.S. (or London) - the choice of Italian settings in so many of her works does carry a touch of exoticism and a cultural reference point but it’s a point that will feel remote by too many of her potential readership. 

Jean Rhys’s last (?) novel, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) is a bit of a neat trick - one that I really couldn’t get when I first read this novel many years ago - before I’d read Jane Eyre, about which one must know at least the rudiments of the plot of JE (Jane’s beloved from a far “master,” Rochester, lives in a strange old house within which he’s stashed away his delusional and dangerous first wife - who takes her revenge of sorts by setting fire to the mansion). OK, to Rhys’s WSS is an attempt to bring to life the unexamined “mad” wife held captive in the attic: What brought her to this point? To what extent is Rochester complicit in her death, in her madness? All that said, it’s also important to be able to read and appreciate and even enjoy this dark novel without making the JE connection - and JR does a neat job tracing the course of the wife’s - Antoinette’s? - abandonment and decline; the unfeeling narrator (is he named at all?\) of the 2nd half of the novel turns against his young, beautiful, mixed race (?) wife after receiving documents that suggest she is “mad” and any children they have together will suffer from the same or similar madness. This man is as weak and cruel as can be - and a racist to boot. All of our sympathies are with the vulnerable bride. The writing is at times quite beautiful, esp in Rhys’s evocation of the look and feeling of the tropical Windward Island, in its beauty, danger, isolation - in particular the subtle and mean interaction of the proud English landowner and the slave/servant population, on the verge or just past the verge of outright revolt. I would say that JR, probably too heavily under the influence of Faulkner, makes the narrative line unnecessarily difficult to follow - with little clarity about the characters names and with the sequence of events - but as one progresses through the novel the major strands of the plot become more clear: a challenging book, but worth the effort. 

I’m not a huge fan of the annual Archival issue of the New Yorker, but it was strange and informative thread Nat Hentoff’s profile of Bob Dylan published back in 1964 (I was too young to have read that!); Hentoff wrote many smart analyses of popular music and, especially, of jazz (lots of liner notes) - back then I though he too often stated the obvious and I felt a little jealous that his insights, so evident to teenagers, were treated as gospel by so many publications - now I have a better sense of Hentoff’s groundbreaking work, crossing cultural barriers. Anyway, his must have been one of the few extensive profiles of Dylan toward the end of his “folk era.” Without a doubt he had more face time w/ Dylan than any other magazine writer before and perhaps since; Dylan became increasingly guarded over the years, understandably. My takeaway from this profile was that Dylan was impatient to bring his work in a new direction but couldn’t yet quite characterize his inchoate work - the songs, when written and recorded would speak for themselves (so to speak), and Dylan was aware of this. Hentoff got from Dylan the sense that he was moving beyond protest/folk songs and more into social commentary - a much more complex and rich vein for his music. What Hentoff missed was any sense that Dylan was soon to “go electric” and change forever the nature of rock music - from a kind of classical voice - each rock song could in effect be performed by anyone; rock was from a universal voce - to a “romantic” voice: Each song was the personal affirmation of an individual artist. Who could possible foresee where Dylan would go in his career? Who would have bet, in 1964, that Dylan would be a Nobel laureate? We also see from this early profile that Dylan liked, and needed, an entourage for his support, esp in a recording session. Also that Dylan was sincere and generous in his support for righteous causes. And that Dylan could be unhinged and inappropriate at times (the account of his recording session; the priceless account of his speech to a liberal social-action group that had presented him w/ an award) - likely indications of a drinking problem in its early stages. Hentoff was also suckered by Dylan’s exaggerated autobiography; Dylan did not wish to talk about his family - but we know now that his childhood and youth were conventional and that he did not run away from home pretty much every year from age 10 or so.

A.B. Yehoshua’s novel The Retrospective (2011) is far from his best work, although there’s always some value in reading his fiction, which always presents a viewpoint on contemporary life in Israel among a wide social set and in many of his novels, including this one, with lots of insight and opinion on those who work in the arts - writers, actors, musicians, et al. The drawback in this work is that the central figure is a film director toward the end of his career, invited to Spain for the eponymous retrospective on his films - and although I could recognize his un-ease at seeing screenings of his early works it’s really hard to describe effectively a movie that doesn’t and never has existed; the mid- or late-career artist works well as a trope in film - see 8 1/2 - as does the artist/writer at the end of his/her rope - see The Great Beauty - but here I never got a clear sense of the content and context of his movies. More troubling, the ending of the novel is preposterous - too bad because the penultimate section, in which the director drives to a remote family complex near the Gaza border for a final confrontation with the screenwriter with whom he’d had a life-long falling out - a great and beautifully rendered scene - and ABY should have left it there rather than send his director off on a pointless and maddening attempt to re-enact a scene from a Reubens painting. Don’t even ask.  

July 2022: Yehoshua, Laxness, and Soderberg (with a note on Nabokov)

 Elliot’s Reading - July 2022: Yehoshua, Laxness, and Soderberg

I don’t think anyone would say that recently deceased A. B. Yehoshua’s novel The Extra (2014) is his best, not when compared with, say, Mr. Mani or Open Heart or even the more recent A Woman in Jerusalem, but I’ve yet to come across a novel of his that failed to hold my interest and to inform me about daily life in war-torn Israel, where we Americans probably imagine all life to be on the edge and in fact, as ABY presents it, Israeli life is loud and complex and full of cultural significance and more cross-cultural than we could possibly imagine. The Extra centers on a 30-something woman, divorced and without children - by her choice, but a choice that led to the break-up of her marriage - now spending two months or so in her mother’s Jerusalem apartment while her mother tries out a new living arrangement in assisted living in Tel Aviv: Will she stay or will she go? While tending her mother’s apartment, the “extra” (she earns a little money and has some adventures in playing several roles as a movie extra) recognizes many elements in her own life story - which is quite engaging, in fact, the best part of the novel I’d say: She’s a harpist in a Dutch orchestra, on leave, and through her perspective we learn a ton about orchestral performance and idiosyncrasies. I totally enjoyed that aspect. Less so, the complexities of her family life and her sojourn as an “extra,” a neat plot angle but with little pay-off. Ditto for her on-going battle with some young kids in the neighborhood who keep breaking in to her unit to watch TV (forbidden in their Orthodox home) - lots of set-up with little payoff. 

Some novels I didn’t finish reading - including Vladimir Nabokov’s The Gift, which he finished in the late 1930s but wasn’t published till the ‘40s and not available in English (VN and son, trs.) until I think the 1950s - and though it was mentioned in an NYT story as a good intro to life in Berlin in its time I found it to be only an intro into the life of a Nabokovian character, meaning a writer who’s more interested in displaying his genius than in telling a story or evoking a time and place; obviously, the first section is an homage to Proust, or maybe an attempt at doing Proust one better, but the obsession w/ memory and desire is central to appreciating and loving the Search for Lost Time in VN’s hands these topical details about his early life do not go toward developing character or theme or even in entertainment. Some of his early English-language novels go one better, tho I have always loathed his most famous. Second novel I will not finish is clearly just not meant for me - John Avid Lindqvist’s Harbor (2008, tr. 2010), which, similar to above, was touted as a good intro to life in Sweden, which it clearly is not - Swedes are not Stephen King characters and monsters and horrible beings don’t just emerge from the ice - I liked the movie based on one of JAL’s novels, Let the Right One In, in that, surprisingly, it told a drama of your misfits, the beaten and bullied, but Harbor just didn’t carry that wait nor could it carry me along buoyed by suspended disbelief much beyond 50 pp (out of 500!) 

Swedish novelist Hjalmar Soderberg’s most famous (only famous?) novel, Doctor Glas (1905) is a strange, short, first-person confessional narrative is the woeful tale of a sad and it would appear thoroughly deranged 30-something physician in Stocholm who for some reason is writing a notebook/diary about his deeply troubled interior life. He’s a successful but not world-beating GP; he lives alone and in fact has never had sexual relations w/ anyone, male or female; in one passage he tells of the one brief love of his life, a woman who died through accident shortly after they had met and seemed to fall for one another, though nothing transpired, so to speak. At this point in his life he sees himself as an outsider, a loner, an unattractive man who has been passed by in life - he’s a descendant, so to speak, of Dostoevsky’s “underground man.” As it happens, a woman whom he’s really attracted to calls on him asking him to resolve a sexual issue in the woman’s marriage; this leads to Glas’s animus against her husband, a noxious clergyman, and, later, to extreme jealousy as he recognizes the handsome young man w/ whom the woman has fallen in love. The novel chronicles the unraveling of a mind driven mad by loneliness and social isolation - a terribly sad story that feels to be at just the right length; who could take anymore of this sadness? 

The Icelandic writer Halldor Laxness is known to American readers, if at all, as perhaps the most obscure winner of a Nobel Prize in literature and in particular for his novels Independent People, which I delved into many years ago and didn’t finish reading but probably I was not ready to read that novel (I’ve since been to Iceland) and for Iceland’s Bell, which I did read and it held my interest. The Fish Can Sing, his poorly titled novel from 1957, is not an excellent gateway to HL’s work but is a pretty good “bildungsroman,” part of that tradition - largely Germanic and, I guess, Scandinavian - of a novel that traces the course of the life of the artist. Nobody will be fooled by HL’s identifying the calling of his young protagonist as an aspirant to Opera, spurred by his longing the emulate the most famous Icelandic opera singer, Gardar Holm, well maybe the only one, of this day. Of course it’s the story of the coming of age of a young writer - and in fact it mostly focuses on his childhood home and the eccentricities of many of the people in the impoverished, remote fishing village of his childhood. Today a novel such as this would the identified w/ Auto Fiction - or, if not that, would be reworked as a nonfiction narrative, such as Per Peterson’s more recent collection of essays about his childhood in a remote part of Denmark. Fish Can Sing is really two novel sin one: the first, the story of a childhood prodigy, and the 2nd the account of the young man’s encounters with the world famous Gardar Holm and his occasional, strange return visits to his homeland - mostly in the latter half of the novel. Few readers will be surprised by the plot twists and big reveals in that section, but so be it. The novel as a whole is quite readable, far less intimidating than HL’s grandest works, but on the other hand not really the best account of what made his fiction step onto the world stage. Elliot’s Reading - July 2022

Yehoshua, Laxness, and Soderberg

I don’t think anyone would say that recently deceased A. B. Yehoshua’s novel The Extra (2014) is his best, not when compared with, say, Mr. Mani or Open Heart or even the more recent A Woman in Jerusalem, but I’ve yet to come across a novel of his that failed to hold my interest and to inform me about daily life in war-torn Israel, where we Americans probably imagine all life to be on the edge and in fact, as ABY presents it, Israeli life is loud and complex and full of cultural significance and more cross-cultural than we could possibly imagine. The Extra centers on a 30-something woman, divorced and without children - by her choice, but a choice that led to the break-up of her marriage - now spending two months or so in her mother’s Jerusalem apartment while her mother tries out a new living arrangement in assisted living in Tel Aviv: Will she stay or will she go? While tending her mother’s apartment, the “extra” (she earns a little money and has some adventures in playing several roles as a movie extra) recognizes many elements in her own life story - which is quite engaging, in fact, the best part of the novel I’d say: She’s a harpist in a Dutch orchestra, on leave, and through her perspective we learn a ton about orchestral performance and idiosyncrasies. I totally enjoyed that aspect. Less so, the complexities of her family life and her sojourn as an “extra,” a neat plot angle but with little pay-off. Ditto for her on-going battle with some young kids in the neighborhood who keep breaking in to her unit to watch TV (forbidden in their Orthodox home) - lots of set-up with little payoff. 

Some novels I didn’t finish reading - including Vladimir Nabokov’s The Gift, which he finished in the late 1930s but wasn’t published till the ‘40s and not available in English (VN and son, trs.) until I think the 1950s - and though it was mentioned in an NYT story as a good intro to life in Berlin in its time I found it to be only an intro into the life of a Nabokovian character, meaning a writer who’s more interested in displaying his genius than in telling a story or evoking a time and place; obviously, the first section is an homage to Proust, or maybe an attempt at doing Proust one better, but the obsession w/ memory and desire is central to appreciating and loving the Search for Lost Time in VN’s hands these topical details about his early life do not go toward developing character or theme or even in entertainment. Some of his early English-language novels go one better, tho I have always loathed his most famous. Second novel I will not finish is clearly just not meant for me - John Avid Lindqvist’s Harbor (2008, tr. 2010), which, similar to above, was touted as a good intro to life in Sweden, which it clearly is not - Swedes are not Stephen King characters and monsters and horrible beings don’t just emerge from the ice - I liked the movie based on one of JAL’s novels, Let the Right One In, in that, surprisingly, it told a drama of your misfits, the beaten and bullied, but Harbor just didn’t carry that wait nor could it carry me along buoyed by suspended disbelief much beyond 50 pp (out of 500!) 

Swedish novelist Hjalmar Soderberg’s most famous (only famous?) novel, Doctor Glas (1905) is a strange, short, first-person confessional narrative is the woeful tale of a sad and it would appear thoroughly deranged 30-something physician in Stocholm who for some reason is writing a notebook/diary about his deeply troubled interior life. He’s a successful but not world-beating GP; he lives alone and in fact has never had sexual relations w/ anyone, male or female; in one passage he tells of the one brief love of his life, a woman who died through accident shortly after they had met and seemed to fall for one another, though nothing transpired, so to speak. At this point in his life he sees himself as an outsider, a loner, an unattractive man who has been passed by in life - he’s a descendant, so to speak, of Dostoevsky’s “underground man.” As it happens, a woman whom he’s really attracted to calls on him asking him to resolve a sexual issue in the woman’s marriage; this leads to Glas’s animus against her husband, a noxious clergyman, and, later, to extreme jealousy as he recognizes the handsome young man w/ whom the woman has fallen in love. The novel chronicles the unraveling of a mind driven mad by loneliness and social isolation - a terribly sad story that feels to be at just the right length; who could take anymore of this sadness? 

The Icelandic writer Halldor Laxness is known to American readers, if at all, as perhaps the most obscure winner of a Nobel Prize in literature and in particular for his novels Independent People, which I delved into many years ago and didn’t finish reading but probably I was not ready to read that novel (I’ve since been to Iceland) and for Iceland’s Bell, which I did read and it held my interest. The Fish Can Sing, his poorly titled novel from 1957, is not an excellent gateway to HL’s work but is a pretty good “bildungsroman,” part of that tradition - largely Germanic and, I guess, Scandinavian - of a novel that traces the course of the life of the artist. Nobody will be fooled by HL’s identifying the calling of his young protagonist as an aspirant to Opera, spurred by his longing the emulate the most famous Icelandic opera singer, Gardar Holm, well maybe the only one, of this day. Of course it’s the story of the coming of age of a young writer - and in fact it mostly focuses on his childhood home and the eccentricities of many of the people in the impoverished, remote fishing village of his childhood. Today a novel such as this would the identified w/ Auto Fiction - or, if not that, would be reworked as a nonfiction narrative, such as Per Peterson’s more recent collection of essays about his childhood in a remote part of Denmark. Fish Can Sing is really two novel sin one: the first, the story of a childhood prodigy, and the 2nd the account of the young man’s encounters with the world famous Gardar Holm and his occasional, strange return visits to his homeland - mostly in the latter half of the novel. Few readers will be surprised by the plot twists and big reveals in that section, but so be it. The novel as a whole is quite readable, far less intimidating than HL’s grandest works, but on the other hand not really the best account of what made his fiction step onto the world stage. 

June 2022: Fiction from Shirley Hazzard, Portugal (Claudio Pineiro,) Pakistan (Ahmida Ahmad), and the U.S. (Hernan Diaz)

 Elliot's Reading June 2022: Shirley Hazzard, Claudio Pineiro, Ahmida Ahmad, and Hernan Diaz

You can see why the Argentine writer Claudia Pineiro has been compared with Hitchcock if you read her 2007 novel Elena Knows (Eng. tr. 2021 by Frances Riddle)  as the novel is on the surface a quest by a 50ish woman, Elena, whose daughter, Rita, has been found hanged from a belfry inside a church an apparent suicide but not apparent to Elena who is striving to discover who killed her daughter. Great, a mystery - but it doesn’t take long before we realize that the mystery itself is far less significant than the development of Elena’s character, notable in particular in that she is in an advanced stage of Parkinson’s and every motion, every step, for her is agony. Never, I think, has an illness been depicted so vividly in fiction from the POV of the suffering character, and by the end we have tremendous sympathy for Elena and for anyone else trying to make headway in his/her life with this affliction. That said - the mystery has to be resolved. I will not divulge anything here, but I would have to say that it feels as if CP set herself a challenge that she could not meet; I would guess that she did not foresee the conclusion when she started; rather, the suicide/homicide was like Hitchcock’s famous “Maguffin,” the prop that sets all in motion and is by the end largely irrelevant. The novel takes a strong stance, near the end, in the indictment of the ban on abortions and in support of a woman’s right to choice - good on that - though I have to say the politics feels squeezed in or tacked on and not sufficient in scope to explain the course of Rita’s last days. I doubt if any reader will be satisfied with the outcome of the narrative - though all readers will be moved and troubled by the depiction of a woman suffering in a mortal illness. 

The last section of Shirley Hazzard’s Collected Stories (2020) consists of stories “uncollected” or unpublished to date; we have to assume that she had tired for the form and had moved on, successfully, to novel-length work; in fact, her 2nd collection, People in Glass Houses, reads much like a novel. Two of the stories among the unpublished probably shouldn’t be recognized as finished pieces; they seem to be stories she put aside or abandoned. A few of the uncollected, though, are of the highest caliber; I particularly liked Out of Itea, that quite simply and beautifully recounts a Grecian ferry crossing - delving into the personality and behavior of each passenger w/ particular attention to the young Norwegian couple that seems to attract comment and attention from all the others. Even at her weakest, SH is quick with a quip or odd turn of phrase, and all of the stories have a suitable conclusion, rather than drifting off to nowhere as do so many NYer stories in the present day. 

First, what’s right and admirable in Aamina Ahmad’s debut novel, The Return of Faraz Ali (2022): start off that AA writes in an intelligent third-person style, not the usual first-person often narcissistic style of recent auto-fiction of personal confession. Second, she’s nothing if not ambitious: She could have confined this novel to one narrative line and she’s got a good one at the center of her vision, an eponymous police officer in a provincial city in 1960s Pakistan is re-assigned to the capital, Lahore, and pretty much ordered to take care of the investigation of the murder of a teenage girl (prostitute, probably), that is, to make the crime go away. His attempt to please his superiors, while also taking seriously a horrendous crime, leads to many complications. Good! Third, she hasn’t confined her ambition to one plot line; rather, there are several, one concerning the Farraz’s search for his secret of his mysterious parentage, also a washed-up Pakistani film star tries to return to the limelight, also we get the back story of the Faraz’s immediate superior, re his escape from an Italian prison in Libya during or just after the WWII. Whew. Which leads to my frustration with this novel: despite AA’s sly homage to George Eliot, this is no Middlemarch, as it’s hard to carry this kind of narrative weight in the 21st century, or even the 20th for that matter. My patience ran thin. Second, AA goes to great length to capture and depict street life in Lahore, but in doing so she uses so many words and phrases from Urdu, some discernible others not, at least to me, that it almost becomes a joke. Good luck if you can read this book and look up all the unfamiliar terms. Third, With all that narrative weight, I had to struggle to keep everything in mind, even the names of the major characters - she falls short, I think, on simple depiction, and add that to the unfamiliar names, many of which start w/ the same letter!, and even + half-way through the novel I’m flipping back pages to see who might be who. Ultimately, there’s so much going on here that I lose    sight of - and interest in - the main plot line, as the novel, so impressive at times, for me began to die of its own weight. So I may not be the ideal reader here, but I couldn’t push much beyond the half-way point - but I’m sure this novel will interest many and I’m sure AA has started a brilliant career. 

Hernan Diaz’s 2022 novel, Trust, consists of 4 sections of roughly equal length (ca. 100-pp.), all of which, though this is not evident at first pass-through, concern the same family : a family of a huge investment firm in the early 20th century. The first section is a third-person account of the rise of the family and the mental illness suffered by the patriarch and by the spouse of the financial leader, whose decline into fear and paranoia is the heart of the story, in particular the crude and cruel supposed treatment she received at a “Magic Mountain”-like clinic in Europe. As others have noted, this section is in the style of say Wharton or even H. James - though not nearly as sharp and nuanced; it seems amateurish. The 2nd section tells of a similar clan, with similar issues of mental decline, though in this instance, first-person narrative, the declining wife receives tender and loving care; it’s also evident that this is a detailed sketch for a memoir (includes many passages such as “as details here”). OK - but I’m getting pretty bored by now! Third section (which I skimmed, sorry - reader’s privilege, this is not a “book review”) is told any a writers in late life - late 20th century - who was hired to ghost-write the novel, a re-write of the 2nd section. OK, but why? What’s happening here? It seems like a series of unreliable narrators (the 4th section is the notebook kept by the woman in the sanatarium, all fragments) - in the style of say Remains of the Day, in which the (various) narrator(s) reveal much about themselves inadvertently and in which we can see around the edges of each piece of writing. So, it’s a smart, clever book that entails intense reading and skepticism, but in the end, I’m sorry to say, that from the plot line was uninteresting, not enough to carry the wait of the various narrative stances - a work rich in irony and ambiguity but without a sharp enough payoff. 

May 2022: Shirley Hazzard, Allice Munro, Vladimir, Groundskeeping, Fortune Men (The),Occupational Hazards

 Elliot’s Reading - May 2022

Just a few words on Shirley Hazzard’s first published book, the story collection Cliffs of Fall (1963), collected in her Collected Stories, in which Zoe Heller’s Foreword recounts how SH sent the story Harold unsolicited to the NYer, w/ a note that there was no need to return it if they didn’t want to publish, which led to a call from the fiction editor who enthusiastically picked up the story and many other subsequently from SH. So is Harold still an amazing story? SH’s writing sentence by sentence is immaculate - both her eye and ear for topical detail and nuances of speech but in particular for her thousands for social observations and insights - we can see this quite well in Harold, whose eponymous central character is an obviously disturbed young man living w/ tyrannical parents. So, yes, her fiction stands up well to the test of time - if not as well as the more dramatic and eccentric likes of O’Connor or Welty, to name 2 s-s masters. What holds SH back from the very top ranks is the confinement of her work, her settings - almost all in this first collection involving Brits and Americans spending the summer in various pensions in Italy - a way of life possible when the dollar was so strong (and the lira weak) but now remote, as if from another planet. At some point I’ll read further in her fiction and see if she breaks out of the tight confines of a narrow social set.

I

ll say this about Julia May Jonas’s novel, Vladimir (2022): It will keep you reading (it kept me reading) right to the end, which is more than most contemporary novels manage to do. It’s pretty tense and intriguing throughout - a first-person narration in which a highly intelligent intellectual professor novelist recounts her infatuation with a new colleague, the eponymous Vladimir, and how her infatuation and the ludicrous terms of her marriage in which they each pledge to tolerate the dalliances and worse of each other - you can imagine how that works out as she gets older, in her own eyes, and husband continues to attract his adoring students - until he suddenly doesn’t as the world caves in around him and he finds himself facing public hearings and discipline. There’s an extraordinary amount of drinking and smoking throughout the novel (plus a lot of high-end grocery shopping and home cooking) and I have to say that none of the leading characters is appealing (to me) in any way and the satire of university politics wears a little thin - such an easy target! - but I love the many literary allusions (sorry, can’t help myself there) and name-dropping and, though the conclusion isn’t entirely credible, it’s at least quite dramatic, and how can you not see this novel as the prelude to a miniseries? If nothing else, this novel must the success de scandale of the year, maybe the century, at Skidmore College, the thinly veiled setting. So, look, lots to enjoy here, lots of insight into the character of a middle-aged woman desperately seeking to retain and rekindle the allure of her youth, some great skewering of academic politics, and all at not much more than 100 pp. 

Lee Cole must be a really nice guy, as the characters in his debut novel, Groundskeeping (2022) are pleasant, friendly, and credible people - esp noteworthy in that this is yet another campus-based novel, a genre prone to cynicism, irony, and deep character flaws (see above - post on the recent novel Vladimir). A review of a Richard Russo novel some years back - and it’s no coincidence that this novel carries a blurb from same - said that RR initiated a 3rd novel “type” - someone takes a journey, a stranger comes to town, and, in Russo’s case, Schmo stays at home. Cole’s novel stays at home or close to it, and it feels as if it must be somewhat autobiographical, as it’s about the coming of age of an aspiring novelist - though it’s clearly not a work of auto-fiction. That said: This novel is, how else can I put this?, really dull. The plot in essence - this based on a reading of the first 100+ not-small pp., about 1/3 through the book - entails a protagonist meeting an alluring woman at a grad-student party, he learns that she’s a visiting writer (he’s enrolled in one fairly ludicrous writing course, a perk he gets because he works on the grounds crew of the U.), he pursues her w/ some ardor, she tells him she’s in a relationship however, and he learns that said relationship is w/ a guy in his writing course. They all converge at a downtown (Louisville) club, without any serious consequences. Meanwhile, writer living with his grandfather (quaint, old-fashioned, veteran) and his uncle with disabilities (cranky, selfish). Schmo stays at home. In some ways this novel reminds me of the talk and gossip in a Sally Rooney novel - a worthwhile role model, as perhaps a male-centered v. will take off - or at least make another good miniseries. In other ways, I ask: Why the fuss over this debut? The jacket blurbs are of the highest order, and there was a rave review in the NYTBR, which drew me to this work. I guess I’m missing something - it’s a pleasant enough work, which in itself sets it apart, but there must be more to it than this. 

Two excellent and quite different stories this week, first, Alice Munro’s Runaway, the title story in one of her final collections, and if anyone is in doubt about her deserved winning of a Nobel Prize take a look at this piece; there’s a twist at the end, and I won’t give anything away - but this story in about 40 pp. covers as much ground as many novels, but in a clear, sharp manner, never feeling rushed or arbitrary - quite conventional, in fact, in the technique, a series of short narrative patches that follow part of the life course of a young woman on a remote Ontario farm, her fears about her temperamental husband, tensions with the nearest neighbors who are of an entirely different social class and milieu (he’s a famous poet; the young couple are working class and not well educated; the young woman is their cleaning-lady). In fear of her husband’s violence, the young woman - is she the runaway? - expresses her worry to the neighbor woman who takes exulting joy in helping the young woman to feel to Toronto and a new life. The consequences of her impulsive flight resound right to the final sentence. Second story not by a eminence but by a writer unknown till now to me, Occupational Hazards, by Jamil Jan Kochai - and the entire store is told as a series of imagined job applications spanning the course of the life of a man born in Syria (?), later emigrating to the U.S. and trying amid much hardships to support a family and raise children. It’s a truly sad story, and truly global in its scope, and though I doubt whether another writer will ever take on the same narrative strategy it in this appearance feels organic and right, never gimmicky. As in Runaway, the story concludes with a surprising twist of fate, which again I won’t give away, and along the course of the narration there is much heartbreak, struggle, and intensity - and a close look at a culture and way of life rarely addressed in American fiction. 

O had a lot of trouble engaging w/ Nadifa Mohamed’s Booker-finalist novel The Fortune Men (2021) - maybe it’s just me but from the outset I had trouble developing a clear picture of the major characters, of which there are several, and the novel to me didn’t really get going until the central event - a murder - and the arrest of an innocent man, mistreated misjudged by the police in Cardiff because he’s a Black man (Somali). Much of the novel feels to me over-written and willfully difficult (there are throughout so many foreign (as in, not English) terms that I literally could not understand some of the sentences. It’s a novel of high ambition and apparently based on “true events,” but for a novel with such potential - racial conflict, injustice, crime and punishment - I just never felt drawn to the story nor to the plight of the protagonist. Gave up half-way through. 

Shirley Hazzard’s 2nd book, People in Glass Houses (1967), also a collection of stories almost all of which appeared in the New Yorker, would today probably be marketed as “linked stories” forming a novel. Well, they are linked in that all have the same setting, the thinly disguised United Nations (always called the Organization) HQ (where SH had worked), though I think only 1 of the characters appear in more than 1 of the stories. Whatever we call it, however, it’s an incredible tour de force that, though it’s read rarely today holds up well as a chilling portrayal of a bureaucracy run amok - almost Kafka-esque, especially in the weird, almost frightening account, of one of the employees’s attempt to get a small pay raise. The stories were particularly poignant in their day, when the UN was relatively new and seemed a beacon of hope lighting the way for peace and prosperity - and here we see what it’s like working in the UN, the petty bureaucratic fights, the endless reports and position papers, the subtleties and nuances and need for across-the-board approval for any statement or action, all of which lead nowhere and die in an endless cycle of review - familiar to anyone who’s worked for a bureaucracy: But we somehow expected more of the UN. Even the building - the glory of the world back in the ‘50s, feels archaic and inhuman; as noted in one point, the founders cared about how the building would look from the outside - cool, reflective, “modern” glass - and how it looks for those inside: offices in long windowless hallways. Her turns of phrase and her names for the many offices and programs are hilarious (e.g., DALTO: The Department of Aid to the Less Technically Oriented). 

Chekov plays, O'Connor stories, J. Franzen in brief, and novels by Petterson, Zambra, and Starnone

 From famous first line(s) - “Why do you always wear black?”- to famous last line, which I won’t divulge here, Chekhov’s The Sea Gull is a knockout and, though maybe a little heavy-handed in its symbolic compared with the final Chekhov plays, still a great exploration of character, art, and desire over a 2-year span (the later plays adhere more closely to the unity of time). It’s his most directly stated play about playwriting and acting: The central character a young man intent on creating highly symbolic dramas, perhaps a la Strindberg’s Dream Play?, and stages a brief performance for his family and neighbors, in particular his mother who was a star actress now dealing with her fading career as she ages. She’s cruel, mean to him, he pulls the plug on his own play and sulks, or worse. Of course he was in love with the star of the play, Natasha, and when we see her in the 4th act, 2 years along, she’s a mental and emotional wreck, trying to keep together and acting career but seemingly too unstable to persist. The Sea Gull, which the young playwright shot to death for no reason (see Coleridge, maybe?) and with whom Natasha identifies is a rare and great example of the “objective correlative,” a symbol carrying the weight of an entire narrative. 

The Cherry Orchard is rightly revered and appreciated not only as his Chekhov’s play - capping a quartet of great plays that set a standard for dramatic naturalism - but also as his most accessible play. The main plot strand is really simple: A seemingly wealthy middle-aged woman returns to her family estate in Russia as part of an entourage (daughter, step-daughter, brother, + a troop of servants) recognizing that she’s completely out of $ and faced with a terrible, to her, decision: should she sell off the land (with the eponymous orchard) to pay her debts and move on - and if so, to whom? To the rapacious landowner, rising from his peasant background, who wants to clear everything for development? Terrible to her, but what’s the alternative? As part of this play we get much more upstairs/downstairs than in other Chekhov play, and a really sad, romantic element as the assembled families and friends try to build a match for the step-daughter, Varya, but nothing seems to click and we get the sense that she will be alone for a long time. Ultimately, the sorrow about the sale of the orchard seems like a romantic delusion, as the woman and her family head off to Paris, leaving behind the sound of the axe hitting the trees - because of her social stature, she can move on. How about the others, though? It’s rightly called a “comedy,” unlike his three previous plays, and technically that’s correct - but it’s possibly the most mournful comedy ever written. Nobody dies, but what kind of life do they lead? The histrionics about the sale seem, in the rear view, comic and hyperbolic. 

Like so many books (and films) these days (or is it me?), Domenico Starnone’s novel Trust (2019, tr. from the Italian by Jhumpa Lahiri) gets off to a great start, maintains that momentum for a while, and then the thread loosens and slips away by the conclusion, as if the author himself lost sight of where he was going w/ this novel (presumptuous of me to day, but does anyone disagree?). Inevitably some spoilers will follow, so if plot is your main reason for reading a novel, reader beware: Trust begins with a person - a writer? writing the very novel we’re reading? how post-modern, which is to say how passee …with the narrator lamenting the end of a passionate affair in his youth (an affair that, as Lahiri rightly notes in her afterword, we might balk at the “me too” element of this affair - h.s. teacher and recent graduate); as part of this relationship, narrator (Pietro) and beloved former student (Teresa) tell each other something they’ve done about which they feel horribly guilty and whose revelation would discredit them forever. This “trust” exercise hopes over the entire novel - am I not right in lamenting that we never learn the confession? The novel follows the narrator over the course of his life, as he becomes a widely read and respected writer about education reform; en route, he provides a # of enemies, notably a leftist critic, who at first hates P but over time develops a friendship and admiration. A few other people complicate P’s life over time, notably the editor of his book, with whom he nearly but not quite begins an affair, and even his wife, who at times feels too much in the shadow of his fame - in other words, several people could disrupt his seemingly self-satisfied and productive professional life. But, hey, nothing happens! Teresa, a constant threat, pretty much just fades into the background; P’s adult daughter uses her influence (she’s a reporter) to get her dad a medal of recognition - a display of hubris that would get her fired in any American newspaper (or it should, anyway). And at the end, the novel, despite flirting with drama and danger, ends up unleavened, with P enjoying his old age (in his 80s) and having just completed a novel (this one??). Starnone keeps the tension up throughout, and his writing is clear and on point - enough to draw me to conclude this relatively short novel, but in the end I can’t help but feel that there was no there there. 

Per Petterson shot to international fame, and rightly so, thanks to his novel from 2003, Out Stealing Horses, which subtly and almost invisibly presented a political/historical narrative of Norwegian resistance to the Nazi occupation, story told in retrospect from the POV of a solitary, self-sufficient man who recollected the war years from his childhood, with many lacunas. PP wrote a # of novels before OSH and has done a # since, none of which rose to the elevation of OSH. It took a while for his first published book, Echoland (1989) to land in English in pb but here is is - and how is it? It’s obvious on any reading that this guy would be a real talent - beautiful passages (a night-time fishing expedition, an exuberant bike ride on fitted nearly deserted roads, family waking up in early hours nearly dead because of propane leak, first realization of sexual urges, complicated relationships with domineering dad and a demanding grandfather, puzzlements about his friend’s attraction to older sister. All good - though the book falls into the vacuum of neither fish nor fowl. Roughly, the book is a series of short, seemingly autobiographical, stories or passages about a range of experiences during the 12-year-old central character (told in 3rd person) and his Norwegian family’s summer w/ grandparents in Denmark on a remote coastal town. Each is good - but they don’t quite add up, ending with a contretemps with father that was not particularly well foreshadowed. Defniigely worth reading this book - it’s quite short as well - to get a glimpse of a major writer at the outset of his career and to get a sense of the author’s childhood, background, and native soil; can’t help but wonder, if this book were to be drafted and published today, why the author couldn’t more directly make it either a memoir, a piece of “auto-fiction” pioneered in Norway, see Knausgaard, or coming-of-age novel. 

I have read and posted on many Jonathan Franzen works over the past 15 years or so; despite several quibbles and complaints I have found his work significant and engaging, for the most part, and have noted and will note here again that he hardly needs my support - however - his latest, a 600+page tome that’s the first of a trilogy no less (!) - is, how to put it?, a crashing or crushing bore. I couldn’t finish nor will I though I did slog through 100 or so pp about a minister who sometime in the past had been kicked out of leadership in the Church Youth Org., Crossroads (the title of the novel) for reasons that 100 pp in we still don’t know nor do we care; the novel is a gaze into the reckless adolescent social life of the children of the minister, none of which held events slightest interest for me; the writing is flat and unadorned, the characters are quotidian and conventional, the setting (the 80s, Chicago suburbs) is as bland as can be but not in the least illuminated as with, say, just about anything by Updike on that era. So, I’m done - not a book for me, maybe others will find what I evidently missed. 

In a week(s) of so-called double-issue of the New Yorker, when the short story concerns a young woman’s struggle with what courses at Harvard in which to enroll, I turn elsewhere for some meaningful (to me) short stories, and have enjoyed reading the now out-of-fashion Guy De Maupassant, master of the short form, whose brief story Looking Back is a simple narration of an elderly priest asked by a widowed woman friend to explain what led him to a vow of lifetime celibacy, and he obliges with a deeply sorrowful recollection of his difficult childhood, bullied and isolated, and his intense feelings for his only source of love and solace, a rescue dog, taken from him in a cruel accident and his subsequent realization that he could never and should never withstand the overwhelming feelings of loss and pain that parents are subject to inevitably - so sad, moving, and credible. Opposite on the spectrum would be the hyper-frenetic Joyce Carol Oates, whose justly famous “How I Contemplated the World from the Detroit House of Correction…” is presented as notes for a story unwritten by a young woman from a well-to-do family compelled to steal/shoplift and whose life was/is obviously headed for rx, destruction, bad company, pain, and early death - with this first-person narrative as her striving for salvation and pledging that she will “reform,” and we can only hope so, though the odds don’t look so great - an exciting and unconventional (in structure) story from a writer always attentive to the needs and strengths of those who’ve survived a rough childhood - usually working-class and underpaid, this one being an exception on that score. Also let’s note a Nabokov story that, unusual for him, has great empathy with the characters, an elderly couple whose son has been confined lifelong it appears to a psychiatric hospital - a story, despite its title (Signs and Symbols) is devoid of literary trickery and impersonation. 

Just a brief note on Alejandro Zambra’s brief novel (and I do mean brief, it’s just 80 pp, small pp., lots of blank pages separating the 5 sections) Bonsai, from 1997 (the Melville house tr. doesn’t even give that info) - I mean, seriously, what is so great about this so-called “new classic”? What was new once can years later seem quant and out of date. Essnetially, this novel is about a young man who has a cold and distant sexual relationship with a young woman and after they’re time is over he learns that she has died. He gives us info about the death in brief hints across the course of this narrative. But what’s the point, really? You’d think a so-called novel this short would at least have some poignant or at least engaging scenes, moments, dialogs - but it’s just one of those hall-of-mirror introspections: The narrator is writing a book. But is this book we’re reading the book he’s writing? And, in the end, who cares, just tell us a story! 

As an antidote to some of the disappointing reading I’ve been plagued with I went back over past few days to the always-amazing Flannery O’Connor, reading 3 of her classics: A Good Man Is Hard to Find, Everything that Rises Must Converge, and Parker’s Back. These stories are so great for a # of reasons, including: Most of all, the wit and humor, even when writing about situations or moments that in other hands would be sorrowful; the originality of phrasing, partly a result of her Southern heritage I would think, but many - most - of her sentences could never be composed by anyone but her and definitely not by anyone but a Southern writer; her sly religiosity - in that I think a reader coming blind to her stories would not pick up that she was a devout Christian (Catholic?) - but forearmed with that information we can more easily see the religious overtones, the Biblical allusions, in her fiction; the freshness of her voice, not part of any movement or trend, not in any obvious way indebted to her predecessors, and a counterpoint to the anxiety of influence, she seems to have been born as an original; and the tragedy of her life, long suffering w/ lupus and dying too young - not that anyone would know this from her stories - but know it we can’t help but wonder where her talent might have taken her in later years.