An Artist of the Floating World

Kazuo Ishiguro
1986
Rating: 6.5

Overall this book felt very polished, well executed, and had no blemishes. The novel evinces a powerful sense of even-keeled control and restraint, mostly to its benefit.

I found the subject matter to be very interesting, and for me it was a novelty. i’ve not read many novels set in Japan. The protagonist is an artist who is renowned throughout his city and even the nation for his pro-military art and propaganda prior to and during World War II. He’s celebrated during the war, but in the years immediately following Japan’s surrender, his hawkish views, his activities, and his propaganda present him and his family with a number of difficulties. The story offers a vivid picture of what life was like for its characters.

In addition to the fascinating historical milieu, I enjoyed the way that Ishiguro wove together the narrative. There was an elegant seamlessness in the way that the story unfolded, from plot point to plot point. The novel, his second, also captured the sadness that can accompany the changes brought about by the passage of time, and this was reflected not only in the characters but also in the way that neighborhoods evolved due to the war and its aftermath.

Maybe the novel owes a significant part of its achievement to Ishiguro’s choices around perspective. The protagonist, Ono, is clearly complicit in fueling the ugly fires of Japanese militarism, but the portrait of him, while not making excuses for or justifying his views, offers a rich portrait of him, and of his attempts to process his decisions after the fact.

Ono, who narrates the book, is unreliable, and the use of the unreliable narrator was shrewd and effective.

As for the book’s shortcomings, there were a few minor ones. The language is not particularly vivid or visual, and I think much of that is by design. The restraint was, I believe, intentional, and it seems to me that Ishiguro did not want the language to call attention to itself. The language was not at all bad, it served its purpose, but it’s not a book full of beautiful sentences, nor of vivid visual details.

I also felt that, for a book that revolves so much around art and artists, that it didn’t really talk about art that much in an interesting or novel way. It felt to me like it was written by a man who didn’t know a great deal about visual art and hadn’t bothered to do the type of research that might have brought those passages to life more. Surprisingly few of the books passages concern the act of painting, considering that painting and paintings anchor the story.

I would also say that the characterization is completely adequate, but somewhat perfunctory. Ono the protagonist is rendered as a fully developed, three-dimensional character, but the book’s other characters are adequately developed, but not much more than adequately. They were generally not very vivid on the page.

Lastly, Ono’s views of his actions before and during the war evolve; that is in fact what the book is primarily about, but at the end of the book I was wondering if the character in fact vacillated in a way that was not satisfying, or in a way that weakened the story somewhat. I guess it’s fair for Ishiguro to have created him in a way that he had conflicting views of his own actions and beliefs. Where Ono actually stands in relation to his past is a bit ambiguous, but maybe that was intentional.

This was also true of a shift with his family that I found to be somewhat confusing, although the confusion too may have been intentional on Ishiguro’s part.

Overall I would definitely recommend it if you have any interest in what life was like after the war in Japan. It was pretty satisfying to work through it.

God's Wife

Amanda Michalopoulou
2014
Rating: 7

This was my first novel by a Greek author, and it’s quite good, periodically brilliant. It’s a beautiful premise for a novel, a mostly epistolary first person tale about a 17 year old girl with some masochistic tendencies who marries God, and about how their marriage unfolds, fluctuating between adoration, distrust, and rebellion.

At points the novel, which I would characterize as magical realism, felt like Nobel prize caliber writing, although these moments were fleeting. Through the first two-thirds of the novel I felt like it might rank among my top 10 favorite novels. It cracked the top 20 but not the top 10.

Along the way there are a number of rich insights into Creation, the nature of love and faith, the nature of writing, and what it means to write fiction. The significance and implications of writing, and more specifically what it means for women, is one of the novel’s main themes. One of the accomplishments of God’s Wife is how it manages to explore philosophical ideas and themes without being wooden or bombastic.

It’s almost always the case with any decent novel that a second reading brings you closer to a truer understanding of what the book is about, how it works, what it’s trying to say. That feels like it’s even moreso true with God’s Wife. I read it for a book club, and this novel in particular would be a great one to discuss with other people, owing to certain complexities and ambiguities.

So, why did it not crack the top 10? I would be hard-pressed to identify any legitimate grips I had with the novel, but the closest thing I’d have to a complaint about it is that … to me it felt like it wanted to be more of an epic. It’s a very short novel, 144 pages, and maybe this is a compliment rather than a complaint, but I wanted to scope of the story to be bigger. There are only two characters of any significance in the story, the narrator wife and God.

The book has a plot, but I would not call it a plot driven book. The plot such as it is is somewhat minimal. It’s an effective plot and I’m sure that Michalopoulous structured it carefully, and that it is a shorter novel because she felt that that was the best way to tell the story, but for that reason, to me, the book feels somewhat incomplete. Not fully realized. In particular, the writing around the Creation was interesting, but I felt that she could have leaned much more heavily into this.

The only other minor gripe is that, while ambiguity is a tool that is used intentionally to tell the story, there were a few passages, particularly in the final 20 pages of the book where it felt like “complexity” and “ambiguity” about the relationship degenerated into something of a mish-mash that did not service the telling of the story or the development of the character. There are pages where the wife has opposing or conflicting feelings about God every other paragraph which for me induced a bit of a whiplash sensation.

It is bringing to mind Mariette in Ecstacy by Ron Hanson, which if I recall explores similar themes and subject matter, I will have to take a look at that one too.

All of that said, however, this was a great book, I recommend it.

Love in the Days of Rage

Lawrence Ferlinghetti
1988
Rating: 2.5

I gave this novella 35 pages, which is a third of the book, and I decided to put it down because it was dull and flat. There is some good writing in it, Ferlinghetti is a significant poet, but what killed it for me was the male protagonist droning on and on about his childhood and his political beliefs. He did better work with the female protagonist. But the dude’s rambling monologs I could not abide.

I think maybe even a bit more so than usual I was impatient with this book. Maybe in a few months I’ll pick it up again and start reading where I left off, see if it goes anywhere.

Ask the Dust

John Fante
1939
Rating: 6

Ask the Dust is an uneven novel, with a healthy dose of nice writerly flourishes that are bogged down by patches of melodramatic and cartoonish plot and character development. I’m glad I read it, in part because of where it sits in the body of American literature, in part because I’m interested in the history of Los Angeles, and in part because Fante did have talent as a writer and story teller. I’d recommend the novel to anyone who is interested in the history of Los Angeles, not sure I would recommend it to a general reader.

I went into the novel cold, which is how I prefer reading a novel for the first time. I knew only that he lived in and wrote about Los Angeles.

One of the interesting aspects of the novel for me was considering its influences, as well as how it related to the work of other novelists who followed. It reminded me a bit of Notes from Underground in that it is a novel that’s very focused on the psychological issues of its protagonist; the protagonist’s conflicting and sometimes self-defeating impulses, as well as his self-loathing.

There were a number of uses of the word “clean” as an adjective that seemed to reflect a strong influence of Hemingway. “Strong,” too. Like The Sun Also Rises, Ask the Dust is about a love triangle comprised of damaged people, and explored the themes of frustrated sexual desire. And, as with The Sun Also Rises, the protagonist to a certain extent gets caught up in the whims of the woman he desires. In both novels the woman wears the pants in some ways relative to the male protagonist.

Fante was a significant influence on Charles Bukowski, who mined a similar milieu for his work, the down and out in Los Angeles. It was also interesting to think about whether or not Ask the Dust qualifies for the Noir label, in that the protagonist is deeply flawed and is also alienated within the society he inhabits.

Fante’s work additionally made me think of On the Road, although I don’t know if there was any cross-over. If there is an essay or two out there about Fante as a precursor to the Beats, I’d like to read that essay.

And then of course there is The Long Take, with which Ask the Dust shares the most DNA in terms of subject matter and setting.

One of the challenges with reading the book for me was trying to figure out what to make of the characters’ racism. The protagonist, Arturo Bandini, his Mexican-American love interest Camilla Lopez, and Camilla’s love interest are all racist, as is the woman who runs the flop-house who won’t rent rooms out to Jews.

As a reader I’m still trying to work out exactly how or when a novel crosses over from being about racism to being racist. Ask the Dust occupies a strange grey area between those two poles. There are different ways that an author can signal that s/he and/or are writing about racism to criticize and condemn it. Racist characters can be presented as unlikable villains; victims of racism can be presented as complex but broadly sympathetic. But people are complex, and so are issues of race, so nuanced approaches to the issues of race are appropriate.

Fante in his novel telegraphs that he as a writer recognizes the harms of racism. Bandini at one point attempts to explain his racist verbal outbursts toward Camilla by claiming that he himself, as an Italian American, was the victim of racist abuse in Colorado, where he was from. So the protagonist is troubled by his racism. However, his apparent rejection of racism is fleeting, as he continues to hurl racist abuse at Camilla after his exposure to racism is detailed in the story.

The arc of Camilla also seems to support the idea that Ask the Dust is an anti-racist work, as the story demonstrates the toll the racist and sexist abuse takes on her.

But this all gets fairly complicated, as Camilla is … there are sort of two strands to that drive the story forward: Bandini’s attempts to become a successful writer, and his infatuation with Camilla. Over the course of the story, Camilla, in the final third of the book, transitions from being merely a passive love interest of Banidini’s into more of a dynamic and active character in her own right. However, the camera in the story remains fixed on Bandini at all points, so her experiences are filtered through Bandini, and they are secondary to his development as a writer. Racism then does not receive serious exploration as part of the protagonist’s development.

Additionally, there is weird race- and gender-related stuff between Bandini and Camilla that Bandini fails to recognize as troubling. In the midst of a sexual liason with a Jewish woman whom he uses as a stand-in for Camilla, he fantasizes about Camilla as a Mayan princess, but he is Cortez the conqueror. The goal for Arturo seems to be domination rather than something like love.

It is a convoluted stew. At the end of the day I think the best I can say about Ask the Dust on the issues of race and gender is that it’s a mixed bag.

Our Man in Havana

Graham Greene
1958
Rating: 7

Based on having read and really dug The Quiet American (though a long time ago), I suspected that I was going to like Our Man in Havana, and it generally did not disappoint. The writing throughout is vivid and deft, with inspired gems of sentences on many pages. It was quite funny at moments as well.

Greene apparently considered this book to be among his “entertainments” rather than one of his Signfiicant Pieces of Literature, and maybe you could say that the whimsical tone qualifies it for the judgement, but given the caliber of the writing, it’s hard for me to think of it as anything other than a very good book.

I had the sense while reading it that there were cards he had up his sleeve that I would only see if I went back and re-read the story, which I may do at some point.

Interior Chinatown

Charles Yu
2020
Rating: 6

Interior Chinatown is an example of how a smart premise can almost by itself carry a novel. The premise in question is that the protagonist, Willis, is so invested in his dream of becoming Kung Fu Man in a TV series that is filmed in Chinatown, Black and White, which by extension entails embracing Hollywood’s de-humanizing stereotypes of Asians, that the line for him between the show and his life collapse.

Yu’s prose is not particularly visual, but the book’s tone and wit more than compensate for mostly unremarkable language.

It did feel like the book was missing something. Weight, perhaps. It’s a very breezy book, which is not to say that it’s all fun and games until someone gets kicked in the face, but at times the book had a dashed-off or even quasi-cartoonish quality to it. It was almost like the book wanted you to read it quickly.

Toward the end there is a trial, as with The Sellout, but I think the trial worked better for The Sellout, which was, like Interior Chinatown, set in Los Angeles.

This was not a major issue for me, but I wasn’t sure that positioning Asian-Americans a step below “Black and White” Americans made that much sense. One of the show’s two main characters is a white woman, and the other, her detective partner, is a black man. The book posits a kind of parity between white and black people (actors, in this case) that most certainly does not reflect reality.

It’s a criticism that Yu anticipates and writes into the story at various points, but it’s not clear to me that the way he anticipates or responds to that critique resolves it in a meaningful way.

Minor gripes aside, I did enjoy reading it and would recommend it.

The Tower Treasure

Franklin W. Dixon
1959
Rating: 4.5

We moved at the end of February, and the disruption wreaked havoc with my reading habit. I stopped reading books, for the most part, although I seem to have gotten back into it again.

I picked up 3 Hardy Boys books maybe a year and a half ago in Cold Spring, because I devoured every book in the series when I was young, and I was very curious about what, exactly, I had read.

I have to say I enjoyed reading The Tower Treasure more than I expected to. Reading it as an adult, its flaws were obviously more apparent: a total lack of character development, chiefly. But I also appreciated things about the book that I would not have as a 10-year-old. It was interesting just to read a young adult book written in the 1950s. They say “swell” unironically.

I noted that the lack of character development did not prevent me from being pulled along through the story in a way that was somewhat entertaining.

There were no passages in the book that I remembered reading as a kid, which is not surprising because I probably read that book 40 years ago, or more.

The book reminded me a bit of two other franchises: Leave It to Beaver, and Scooby Doo. Scooby Doo in particular owes basically everything except its outfits to The Hardy Boys, it seems to me.

I had read somewhere that the Hardy Boys series doesn’t do race very well, also unsurprising. The first book in the series fared better in this regard than I anticipated, however. There are no people of color in the story, but there is an Italian immigrant, a shopkeeper in Bayport. One character in the story, Oscar Smuff, expresses anti-immigrant views, and Smuff is a bad guy. So, Dixon seems to be pro-immigration, or at least pro Italian immigration.

Where the book did run into some problems was with class. I was surprised by the extent to which the book focused on the socio-economic damage to Mr. Robinson and his family caused by his being wrongly blamed for the book’s central crime, a burglary.

It makes sense from a narrative perspective to wade into the harm brought onto the family due to the false accusation, but their descent from barely middle class into prospective (and presumably temporary) poverty is treated as a major catastrophe.

Characters are shocked and horrified that the Robinsons have to live in (gasp) the poor part of town. Tellingly, people are not freaked out by this part of town because of violent crime — there is no mention of crime in this part of town — it is the poverty itself that is horrifying and to be avoided at all costs.

The book embraces a fear of and a subtle contempt for economically disadvantaged communities that seemed toxic. The Robinsons, in the book, differentiate themselves from their neighbors in the story by trying to keep their place tidy and presentable. Maybe this is a back door espousal of racist attitudes, although the racial backgrounds of the poor folks are never mentioned.

The day that I bought the first installment, I picked up two other titles in the series. I’m glad I re-read The Two Towers and have no regrets, but I don’t think I will bother with the other two titles.

Normal People

Sally Rooney
2018
Rating: 2

Made it 160 pages into Normal People and put it down due to dull lifeless prose and sub-par character and plot development.

At the 160 page mark it did seem like one of the novel’s strands, the female protagonist’s relationship with her shitty abusive family, might gather some steam, and that may have salvaged the project, to an extent, but after 160 pages of bad sentences I’d lost my patience.

I’ve decided to include in every review where I shout “bad setences!” some of the bad sentences, so that you, the reader, can gauge for yourself if my idea of a bad sentence matches your idea of a bad sentence. You might think that sentences that I think are bad are totally fine.

That said, here are some of the sentences that caused me difficulties:

Page 7: “For a few seconds he says nothing, and the intensity of the privacy between them is very severe, pressing in on him with an almost physical pressure on his face and body.”

Why would you modify “intensity” with “severe”?

A couple more examples.

Page 22: “In total he had only had sex a small number of times, and always with girls who went on to tell the whole school about it afterwards.”

WTF is a “small number of times”? Why lead into that inelegant formulation with “In total,” which suggests that you are going to cite an actual number?

Page 26: “I like you so much, Marianne said. Connell felt a pleasurable sorrow come over him, which brought him close to tears. Moments of emotional pain arrived like this, meaningless or at least indecipherable. Marianne lived a drastically free life, he could see that. He was trapped by various considerations. He cared what people thought of him.”

This novel, I’ve also just now decided, has changed my approach to reading novels. Some novels I’ve stuck with out of a sense of guilt or obligation, over the 100-page mark, like this one. From now on, I’ve decided, I need to be much more brutal with the novels I read. If I make it 30 or 40 pages into a novel, and it’s replete with bad sentences, I just need to hit the kill switch. The final 120 pages of this novel that I read were a bad use of time. I could have been reading a better novel!

Thank you for your time and attention.

My Sister, The Serial Killer

Oyinkan Braithwaite
2018
Rating: 5.5 (Good, with some flaws)

I dug and would cautiously recommend this debut novel, the premise of which is succinctly stated in the title.

The sisters in question live in Lagos, Nigeria. The murders detailed in the book are, it suggests, the byproduct of domestic abuse the women experienced at the hands of their father. They are also victims of a patriarchal culture that objectifies women.

I’ve read through the reviews, and they seem to be in agreement, and largely correct, about the book’s strengths and shortcomings.

The book’s strength is its plot, which is brisk, or even “taut.” I found it to be entertaining, and I don’t feel guilty about being entertained, and it’s ok both to be entertaining and to be entertained. Nyyyyyyaaaaaaah!!!I kept reading the book because I wanted to find out what would happen! It has a page-turner quality to it.

It offers interesting insights into life in Lagos, it would have been great if “My Sister” offered more of this.

The prose is not ornamental, nor flowery, nor does it really draw attention to itself, but it is, at worst, competent. It was also was tailored, I believe intentionally(?), to the protagonist, a nurse, who is also the narrator.

The book’s shortcomings are that it was perhaps too short, too limited in its scope. It did not venture far from the immediate plot twists, nor did it attempt to make the setting, Lagos, much of a factor in terms of its descriptions. The characterization was flimsy, except for Korede, the protagonist and sister of Ayoola, the murderer.

I will be curious to see what Braithwaite produces next.

The Long Take

Robin Robertson
2019
Rating: 7 (very good, with some defects)

I highly recommend The Long Take, a Man Booker finalist, if, like me, gorgeous, dazzling sentences are basically enough to get you through a novel. I can assert, or maybe even attest, that the author, Robin Robertson, a Scottish poet, is a master of gorgeous sentences. There are too many to even provide examples. I would just reiterate that there was a “wow” moment on almost every page. Really inspiring, beautiful writing.

I hate synopses, but I’ll just say a couple of things about the concept and story. It’s billed on the cover as a “noir narrative,” which is accurate. It’s a novella, a nice short book, perfect for your Covid-shattered attention span. It’s set mostly in LA right after WWII. The protagonist, Walker, is a vet who gets a job as a reporter for a paper in LA. The tale is concerned largely with the changes to downtown L.A., the destruction of a community. The book also winds its way through the making of a number of noir films from that era.

Robertson is more than just a gorgeous-sentence-generating one-trick pony. The way he traces the city’s evolution is compelling. He also exhibits a real talent for mini-vignettes. Chunks of text, a dollop of sentences, that he somehow packs with enough weight to almost qualify as accomplished flash fiction. This one I am going to track down an example of, because I liked it so much. Hold on please.

[Fetches the book.]

There it is, page 122. The only context you need is that Walker is in San Francisco for work, and is just walking around, seeing the sights. I’ll maintain the line breaks as they appear:

He got to work. From the heights to the depths: Howard Street,
south of Market, between 3rd and 4th,
a few blocks away from the Chronicle.
He found a Salvation Army troupe with tambourines
singing in a semi-circle round a bunch of bums: men oblivious
to everything but their jugs of wine.
There’s deep discussion, laughing, hugging,
then a shower of loose punches, and the Army scattering,
some solemn gulps of wine
then more laughs, back-slapping, fumbled rolling of cigarettes.

The Long Take also has what might be the funniest threat I’ve ever read in a novel. I’m not going to write it here, you should just buy and read this book. The threat is on page 136 of the hardcover edition, if you want to cheat, but seriously, just buy and read this book, despite its flaws, which are forgivable, and which I will address in the very next paragraph.

My main complaint with the novella is the way that the plot is concluded, which is a bit of an odd thing to say, because the writing was so good that the story didn’t really need a plot. But, it tried to have one, and the plot that it tried to have held together pretty well for the first 4/5’s of the story (it was pretty minimal and mostly just stayed out of the way of the writing), but then Robertson in a way tried to swing for the fences, in terms of the drama. It’s not correct to say that he failed, it’s just that the final act in the book was a minor let-down relative to the great work that preceded it.

The Long Take to me at times seemed to channel Steinbeck and Hemingway. There’s maybe a bit of Cannery Row in The Long Take, but just a bit; the millieu, mostly. I was not a big fan of the nods to Hemingway (he was fond of “hard” and “clean” as adjectives, like Hemingway ), but these were minimal.

Overall, The Long Take was a pure pleasure, glad to have it on my shelf.

Homegoing

Yaa Gyasi
2016
Rating: 2

I gave Homegoing 122 pages, because the subject matter — the African slave trade as it plays out across generations of African slaves and African slavers, moving from West Africa to the U.S. — was interesting. In the end I put it down because the language, the characterization, the sense of place, were all thoroughly mediocre. It’s just plain bad writing. The characters do not surprise, nor do they come to life. There is a truly unfortunate lack of specific detail which would have made the story more vivid. No visual surprises.

Examples:

“Before long the men came in. Abeeku looked as a chief should look, Effia thought, strong and powerful, like he could lift ten women above his head and toward the sun.”

“Baaba had said that Effia’s curse was one of a failed womanhood, but it was Cobbe who had prophesied about a sullied lineage. Effia couldn’t help but think that she was fighting against her own womb, fighting against the fire children.”

“The need to call this thing ‘good’ and this thing ‘bad', this thing ‘white’ and this thing ‘black,’ was an impulse that Effia did not understand. In her village, everything was everything. Everything bore the weight of everything else.”

The one thing Homegoing did have going for it was the rudiments of a decent plot. And the plot was interesting enough that I almost stuck with the book — and for some readers it might be worth sticking with it — but the lifeless prose just wore me down.

The Hawkline Monster

Richard Brautigan
1974
Rating: 6.5

The onset of the pandemic and the lock-down have shattered my attention span, so I’m trying to read shorter books as a work-around. The Hawkline Monster is a quick and a fun read, I might call it whimsical. There are in its pages some food for thought though, and some very good writing. It bills itself as a “gothic western,” which is a fair assessment. It is a fairly bizarre and surreal take on the Western genre.

There is not much happening in terms of character development, but Brautigan has a good eye for weird details and a knack for layering complex ideas or themes into what is on the surface a sort of farcical tale of twin sisters who live in a haunted house.

Mild Spoilers Ahead

The book opens with the 2 main characters, Greer and Cameron, assassin-cowboy types from Oregon, laying low in a pineapple field in Hawaii, waiting to pop caps into the dome and/or ass of someone they’ve been paid to snuff out. But their intended target is teaching his son to ride a horse, and the assassins find themselves unable to kill a man while he is teaching his son how to ride. So, they don’t kill him.

Putting the cowboys in Hawaii created a pleasing dissonance, and as I came to the end of the story, I wondered about how that first scene fit into the story. It didn’t feel like Brautigan just randomly created that scene and then just left it there, but without re-reading the book I can’t really say what the scene meant.

There are other elements of the story that seemed to support or invite a second reading of the book. There are several pairings, duos, in the story that seem to be pointing to some larger idea.

In summary, it’s a quick and fun read, but not lacking in substance.

Might have to read Trout Fishing in America at some point, although it’s not high on my list.

The Freelance Pallbearers

Ishmael Reed
1967
Rating: 2

This was Ishmael Reed’s first novel, and based on the limited reading I’ve done about him and his work, the consensus seems to be that this was not nearly his best.

I got to page 50 and had to put it down. It was amusing at points, but also induced a weird kind of vertigo, left me feeling like I was stuck in the mind of a crazy person who was just free-associating, and that very well could have been Reed’s desired intent. However, there was not enough happening in terms of plot or character development or things of that nature to keep me hooked, and it really felt like homework.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Milan Kundera
1984
Rating: 6

This review will be a bit less detailed than I’d hoped. My phone died, and I lost many of my notes, including the note I had going for this novel. (Do not use Apple’s Notes app, ever. Since the app deleted a bunch of notes, I’ve seen other people report similar issues online.)

I picked Unbearable Lightness up on a lark, maybe it was a bit of a nostalgia play. I hadn’t thought about it much at all since probably the early 90s, the last time I read it. The copy on my bookshelf was in pretty bad shape. The pages were stiff as corpses and nearly the color of coffee. About two-thirds of the way through, my copy split into two halves. I’ve never had that happen while reading a novel before, maybe the spine of my copy was a stand-in for Communism!

First, the short-comings, most of which were forgivable. I did finish and mostly enjoy the book, but it started off inauspiciously.

The first red flag popped up on page 1, which alarmed me. I remembered vaguely that the novel started with a discussion of Nietzsche’s theory of Eternal Return, and toward the bottom of the page, citing an example of what would be a completely meaningless historical event, Kundera works into his discussion of the theory a hypothetical war in Africa.

I’ll just include the paragraph:

“Putting it negatively, the myth of eternal return states that a life which disappears once and for all, which does not return, is like a shadow … whether it was horrible, beautiful, or sublime, it’s horror, sublimity, and beauty mean nothing. We need take no more note of it than of a war between two African kingdoms in the fourteenth century …”

I read that and thought, “Don’t do this Milan,” but it got even cringier:

“…a war that altered nothing in the destiny of the world, even if a hundred thousand blacks perished in excruciating torment.”

The casual racism, a term that may not have been widely used in 1984, surprised me, and it took some time to process it. I don’t think that Milan Kundera is actively racist (I have not researched his views on race), and Unbearable Lightness is not even remotely a book about race, which made the drive-by “fuck you” to Africa all the more vexing.

And this is in a celebrated novel about life under tyrannical regimes, published by a left-leaning public intellectual. Encountering this right after reading the novel I Pass Like Night, which was a bit heavier on the casual racism, changed my perception of where the country was at on race in the 1980s and 90s. I think I was ignorant and complacent about race, as was the country in general. Our “good guys,” writers whom we esteemed and thought of as artists and standard-bearers, were unwittingly (I hope unwittingly) adding their own small bricks to the edifice of white supremacy.

The passage cast a pall over my reading of the book, the first third of it, or maybe the first half. This wariness was reinforced by the womanizing protagonist, Tomas, who makes sex with many women but who expects his lover, Teresa, to be faithful. He views her as child-like and submissive and this is part of her appeal for him. He’s kind of a pig with maladaptive attitudes about women and sex, but he’s a complicated, considerate, brain-surgeon pig with a big heart!

The narrator addresses some of the gender politics at play, so Kundera does not applaud Tomas’s womanizing, necessarily; however, some of the writing did just sort of leave a bad taste in the mouth. This issue became less prominent as the novel progressed.

A few more quibbles.

The novel regularly evinced a certain pedantic tone, and you got the sense reading it that Kundera had a very high opinion of his opinions. He seems to enjoy explaining and extrapolating on common words, such as “horror,” and of course novels are supposed to interrogate language, but he did this in a kind of clumsy and patronizing tone of voice, as if he imagined himself explaining these terms to children rather than to Stephen Kosloff!

Unbearable Lightness is not particularly noteworthy in terms of its language or imagery, we have to assume the former is better in Czech. I would not say Kundera has a great eye for detail in his writing. I wouldn’t call it a marked deficit, but his talent as a novelist does not lie in these domains.

Generally speaking, the portion of the story that takes place up to and shortly after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 — which is largely concerned with the relationships and sex lives of three of the main characters — is the weaker part of the book. The first half of the novel, while mostly readable, felt something like a slightly wooden European soap opera with a pretentious Nietzsche reference for a welcome mat.

The novel comes into its own, however, once the consequences of the invasion begin to play out more in the characters’ personal lives. The story-telling, and the examination of what the communist system did to its subjects, was adroit. Kundera handled it with panache and feeling. He had the benefit of working with dramatic and evocative subject matter, of course.

There were passages in the book where he was playing with the form in a way that I could not necessarily ferret out on the first read. I did have the sense that Unbearable Lightness would stand up to re-reading.

I have spent a fair amount of time discussing the book’s problems, and it does have problems, but overall I did enjoy reading it, and might even recommend it.

Catch-22

Joseph Heller
1961
Rating: 2

I started having bad thoughts about this novel about 40 pages into it, and my contempt only increased as I moved forward, until I decided I’d had enough at page 97 and put it down for good. I was a bit distraught at the prospect of not liking a book that so many friends and critics love, so I asked around, among my novel-reading friends. One of them called it his favorite novel, said he’d read it 3 or 4 times. Another friend lamented that he’d tried and failed to get into it 3 times.

My problems with the book were (a) too many characters, (b) scanty plot development, (c) very little in the way of meaningful character development (see [a]), (d) jokes, or, more accurately an absurdist posture that felt forced after page 30, and (e) not great language, no eye for interesting detail or vivid imagery.

It’s very dialog-heavy, and the dialog was probably interesting or distinctive when it came out in 1961, but, maybe today it’s something of a victim of its own success. Not that the dialog is stale, but it’s not strong enough to carry the first 11 chapters. As I read it, it seemed like it worked better as a script for a sit-com.

According to the wiki page for the novel, those first 11 chapters form sort of a loose first section of the book, and then chapters 12 through 20 or so detail an attack on Bologna, so they’re presumably a bit more plot-driven. For all I know, they might be pretty great, but unfortunately I am not willing to give the book any more of my time. I don’t have the magnanimity required to give someone a pass after 11 bad chapters.

I was intrigued by the idea of someone attempting to do a re-mix of Catch-22 that cut out the bits that should have been cut out before it was published.

I Pass Like Night

Jonathan Ames
1989
Rating: 5

I mostly enjoyed Jonathan Ames’s first novel, I Pass Like Night, which he published in 1989 around the age of 25. It’s the first and only book of his that I’ve read. I’ve heard from a writer whose opinion I trust that Wake Up Sir is very good, and I’m guessing better than I Pass, which is set in 1983 and concerns itself with the sexual exploits of Alexander Vine, a casually racist door man at the Four Seasons who lives on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and is bi-sexual.

(Don’t know that a disclosure is necessary, but I fraternized on a few occasions with Ames socially while helping to coordinate a performance art event — sheesh, I guess in the early 2000’s.)

I came out of the book thinking that it’s solid work, especially for someone that young. Ames exhibits a confidence and aptitude with his material. The writing occasionally sparkled, and it seemed to point to bigger and brighter work ahead, which is what happened.

I Pass is at its best when it describes the relationship between Alexander and his childhood pal, Ethan. The climax of that relationship, which plays out across two pages, was superb, and those two pages alone arguably justify reading the book. It was poignant, surprising, and it felt true.

The novel is also consistently amusing and occasionally laugh-out-loud funny. I particularly liked the use of “fuck-fingers.”

If Ames’s debut was fun and periodically inspired, it was also underdeveloped. I Pass is short, 167 pages (which in fact is one of the reasons I read it, the lock-down has wrecked my attention span). I am a fan of brevity, but I think in this case the book suffered for it.

There’s nothing wrong with a loosey-goosey, picaresque novel, of course, but even picaresque novels need to congeal in a way that I Pass does not. Some of the characters and encounters felt extraneous or unmoored.

Starting with Alexander’s girlfriend/fuck-buddy, a bartender named Joy. She appears maybe five times in the book, always very fleetingly, and the pattern is that Alexander is emotionally and verbally abusive to her. There’s no arc, or there’s a very clumsy and off-putting arc: he’s a total dick to her.

Which brings us to the second set of problems with the book: its problematic identity politics. To caveat, Ames wrote it when he was 25, in the late 80s. If I had written a novel at that age at that time I would not have handled race or gender the way I’d handle it today. I’m not saying we have to whip out the Cancel Gun.

The cruelty Alexander displays toward Joy, a victim of toxic shock syndrome linked to her use of an IUD, is hard to understand. He makes awful, misogynistic comments about his previous girlfriends too. I’m not sure what the point was, or how the book is better for Alexander’s sexism.

Alexander is cruel to the other person he’s friendly with in the story, a guy he cruises for prostitutes with, so the cruelty is not completely gendered. If the point was to illustrate how the various psychic wounds Alexander sustained affected him, these episodes seemed ad hoc rather than organic.

I Pass was also a bit cringe-inducing in its treatment of race. Aside from a one-sentence mention of black mothers toward the end of the book, all of the black characters in it are either crooks or prostitutes, “whores,” actually. Alexander likens black prostitutes in the beginning of the book to animals in a jungle …

“the great jungle cats of the Tarzan books I had read when I was young. These cats, Numa the lion and Sheeta the leopard knew every creature that passed through the forest and knew what it would do.”

There was another tone-deaf passage later in the book:

“There are more homeless than ever, but the Bowery bum, the white, blue-collar alcoholic, who served in WWII or Korea, is going extinct. The ones that are left, the Jimmy Warren’s, the J. B. Britten’s, have little orange hospital tags on their wrists; they are like marked precious birds in a sanctuary.”

The implication in the passage is that those bums matter more because they are white.

A gay Latino man is portrayed as a predator who promises to use a condom while having sex with Alexander but then goes bareback.

Writers, irrespective of their race, need the artistic freedom to create racist characters and to be able to explore racism in their work. What’s not appropriate is to toss some racist characters into a story, ask your reader to identify with them on some level, and to then say nothing substantive about race. The black characters in I Pass conform to negative stereotypes, and the author’s perspective seemingly aligns with the racist character’s.

There might be a fig-leaf here, in that one of Vine’s older relatives refers to “schwarzes,” a racist yiddish term for black people. So, Ames’s idea is maybe to highlight the social origins of racist attitudes.

But my sense is that this is just casual racism.

Pedophilia and incest are also themes in the book; Vine’s father walks up to or else crosses the sexual assault line with his son, and Alexander is preyed on by an adult camp counselor as well. These themes also felt like they needed to be developed more. I suppose Ames (maybe?) suggests that some of Alexander’s struggles as an adult are tied to these assaults, but the book’s treatment of them is casual and off-handed, and I don’t think that was to the story’s benefit.

The Hobbit

J.R.R. Tolkien
1937
Rating: 10

Most of the reading of books I’ve done was on the subway to and from work. When commuting to work stopped due to the COVID outbreak, on March 13, I stopped reading books, which was distressing, although not as distressing as the widespread suffering caused by COVID.

After a few months of not reading books and hating myself for not reading books, I realized I needed to pick something up that would be fun, and that I knew I’d like. Enter The Hobbit, which I last read in 2006. The prospect of some escapism was appealing, in light of the varied catastrophes the country and my timelines have been clogged with.

It’s a bit odd, the idea of rating and ranking The Hobbit, because I’m measuring it against adult fiction. I’ve seen it referred to as children’s literature as well, but that seems misguided. It’s a 272 page book with beheadings. It also seems weird to pigeon-hole it as YA fiction and/or as fantasy, as it has transcended those categories.

The weirdness of the exercise aside, I had a few thoughts and observations. I admire several of Tolkien’s choices in writing The Hobbit, which made the book richer and more complex. For example, having an off-brand hero (a short, physically timid and vulnerable, risk-averse hobbit) and also having the completion of the hero’s journey result not in a cliched happy ending, but in the hero’s diminishment in and estrangement from his community. There’s a lot to chew on in The Hobbit in terms of what it says about social hierarchies and heroism.

The Hobbit did have two mostly forgivable problems: Thorin’s development and motivations, and Tolkien’s handling of the logistical considerations around the gold. And these two problems are somewhat connected.

Let’s tackle the character motivation issue first.

At some point, maybe a third of the way into the book, I became confused about why the dwarves wanted to travel to the mountain. I didn’t remember if it was (a) just to snatch the treasure, or (b) to snatch the treasure and to kill the dragon and/or to regain the throne under the mountain.

The primary goal, it seems, was to snatch the treasure. In the song the dwarves sing they profess their desire to “seek”, “claim” and “win” the gold. No mention is made of regaining political power. Another passage suggests that they do not intend to rekindle the dynasty.

On page 16, Thorin says:

We shall soon … start on our long journey, a journey from which some of us, or perhaps all of us … may never return.

The plan is to return, not to rule, although I suppose “some of us” not returning might refer to Thorin hanging out in the mountain to rule, rather than not returning due to being dead.

There may also be some ambiguity around killing Smaug. “Win” in the song lyric leaves open the possibility somehow defeating Smaug rather than merely fleeing with the treasure. And on page 23, Thorin says the dwarves want to “bring our curses home to Smaug, if we can.” This phrasing suggests that mixing it up with Smaug is on the table, but it’s not a mandatory.

It’s hard to imagine Thorin being interested in the gold, but not in regaining his ancestral home and power. Thorin’s apparent ambivalence about ruling could have worked if this question had been addressed, even obliquely, and some reason given for this ambivalence, but it’s not addressed.

The degree to which the dwarves blithely cede control of the agenda to Gandalf is also odd, strains credibility, and pulled me out of the story.

In chapter 1 we learn that the dwarves had previously approached Gandalf to seek his help finding another member of their mountain party, for the sole reason that they numbered 13, an unlucky number. We learn in an off-handed comment from Gandalf that he has made a crucial call as to what will happen once they show up at the mountain. On page 14 — and this passage should have been struck, because I think it undermines the entire story — Gandalf, after one of the dwarves has suggested going through the front door into the mountain, says:

“That would be no good, not without a mighty Warrior, even a hero. I tried to find one; but warriors are busy fighting one another in distant lands.”

“I tried to find one” indicates that Gandalf — contrary to the dwarves — initially viewed killing the dragon as being integral to the mission, but settled on burglary (and Bilbo) as a plan B due to a shortage of warriors. You can kind of imagine the dwarves, based on their nature, and maybe Bilbo, due to his inexperience, adopting a “let’s just get there and see what happens” approach to the adventure, but this sentence suggests Gandalf too is not thinking clearly or carefully about the means or the ends, in matters of life and death, and that is not consistent with his character as a wise wizard.

This is also a very puzzling statement in light of Thorin mentioning on page 22 that dragons may have a “loose scale on their armor.” No one in the room suggested trying to find someone to put an arrow through a loose scale?

I suppose, by making the acquisition of wealth Thorin’s only goal, it sets up an opportunity to develop his character, and provides an opportunity for him to achieve an individual moral and political awakening, which is what happens with Thorin, but not in a good way.

The second problem, a minor one, is Tolkien’s treatment of the post-dragon treasure logistics.

On page 198 the party is on the side of the mountain, Bilbo has returned from inside the mountain with a cup, and they’re trying to figure out how to handle Smaug. Bilbo, after the dwarves grumble at him, complains that they didn’t give adequate thought to the plan, and that they did not tell him how much treasure there was.

However, Thorin did tell Bilbo early on about the amount of treasure, stating that his “…grandfather’s halls became full of armour and jewels and carvings and cups.”

And we know that Thorin (and Bilbo) know that the vast treasure hasn’t gone anywhere: “Dragons,” Thorin tells Bilbo, “guard their plunder as long as they live … and never enjoy a brass ring of it.”

If that’s not clear enough, he then says to Bilbo on page 23, in reference to the treasure, “Probably, for that is the dragon’s way, he has piled it all up in a great heap far inside, and sleeps on it for a bed.”

Bilbo (and Tolkien) seem to do some second-guessing about the planning for the trip, but it seems odd to have the characters agree to get to the mountain and see what happens, but to then retroactively criticize their previous planning. By common agreement, there was no previous planning. There is a distinction is between forgetting to make a plan versus making a conscious choice not to have a plan, and this distinction gets a bit fuzzy on pages 198 and 201, although this may also be due to the dragon casting a spell on Bilbo. Tangentially, this conversation between Smaug and Bilbo is also a deft piece of writing, with more happening below the surface than is apparent, and is an example of why it’s not crazy to think of The Hobbit as capital L literature.

One of the other odd features of the book is the large number of dwarves. Why did Tolkien write 13 dwarves into the story? It seems like too many dwarves! The dwarves, aside from Thorin, are almost totally undeveloped as characters. And the lack of development goes further than “fully rounding them out.” Maybe half-way through the book it occurred to me that I had no idea who the dwarves were in relation to Thorin. Later we learn that Fili and Kili are his nephews, which is grand, but what about the other 10 dwarves? Tolkien never tells us if they are friends or family. The assumption has to be that they are not family, because Tolkien spells out that two of them are family.

It is either a glaring omission in the story, or it was intentional. Maybe they are not developed as individuals because Tolkien intended that they serve as symbols, and not giving them any biographies is a way of shouting at the reader that they are symbols. That doesn’t really hold much water though, as symbolism and character development don’t need to be mutually exclusive.

Tolkien intended for the dwarves to represent Jews, so maybe the erasure of the dwarves in the story is meant to highlight that. The topic of Tolkien, dwarves, and Jews is a lively one, I’m not going to wade into it, but, leaving aside the question of what Tolkien may or may not have been trying to say about Jews in The Hobbit, it’s hard to see how their presence, combined with their absence, furthers the story.

Speaking of absences, I also realized at the end of the book that, with the exception of a brief early mention of Bilbo’s mother, there is not a single female character. In that regard The Hobbit is very much a document of its time.

A Novel That Starts with F

By a male author
Published between 2012 and 2016
Rating: 1

One problem with reviewing books is that on very rare occasions I might interact with a writer whose novel I reviewed, and if I trash their book, it’s just very awkward.

So, in some cases, I’m going to post a few thoughts on a novel without revealing the title or author.

I realize this is unorthodox, maybe even irritating. I apologize. The problem is that life is stressful enough without having to worry about showing up at a bar and getting punched in the face by an aggrieved novelist.

So, the novel with the title that starts with F, I made it four pages into it, it was a widely acclaimed novel, but I put it down because the writer’s appallingly flat verbs and their sentence construction more generally. I don’t care if the novel turns into a beautiful swan after page 30, my sense was that the writer did not write terrible verbs knowingly, my impression was that he did not realize he was using terrible verbs, and therefore, I’ll take a hard pass on the book.

Come to think of it, flat verbs were just one of the problems that popped up in the first 3 pages of the book. There was also biographical information about the characters that was extraneous; poorly placed, it just seemed like the character construction was going to be a hot mess.

Beloved

By Toni Morrison
1987
Rating: 10

This was a vexing novel for me. It’s without a doubt one of the foremost examples of the form written in the 20th Century, but for reasons I can’t quite articulate, I appreciate the scope of the achievement (towering), but in some ways could not connect with the story. That’s not a statement about the caliber of the story-telling, it’s more just an attempt to wrestle with my subjective response to the story.

I think the fact that Beloved is, among other things, a ghost story, kind of threw me. There may also have been a kind of claustrophobia that the book induced in me as well, and that may have been intentional. I don’t think that I struggled with it solely because the subject matter was grim, although the subject matter is of course very disturbing stuff.

I don’t know, I feel like I need to go back and look at my notes, I finished Beloved in November and maybe need to revisit it.

The House Gun

By Nadine Gordimer
1999
Rating: 4

The House Gun had some shiny spots in the 100 pages I managed to get through, but not enough to sustain the novel, given a plot that held a good deal of promise, but was stifled by over-generous servings of exposition that was not particularly interesting.

The main characters are the parents of a 27-year-old who may have murdered his house-mate, and it’s set in South Africa. The parents and son are white, the defense lawyer is black.

In addition to a number of passages of exposition that were dull, the novel suffered from melodrama. The mother character in particular was hard to stomach after a while.