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Brat Farrar by Josephine Tey (1949) ** Flimsy premise, a young heir to a small fortune who disappeared 12 years earlier, presumed dead, returns to claim his birthright at age 21. Only it's a look-a-like, trained by a boyhood friend of the heir to impersonate him. That the imposter pulls it off is shaky, that the author wants us to have sympathy for the anti-hero, who after all is engaged in a criminal and very cruel (to the long-suffering family) activity, is even more off-putting. The story meanders about, looking for an apt conclusion which I found unsatisfying as everyone somehow gets their just rewards. Fear and Trembling by Amelie Nothomb (1999) ** A young Belgium woman, with nostalgic memories of an early childhood spent in Japan, returns to savor the land of her birth. She signs a one-year contract with a corporate giant and immediately descends into a workplace Hell. I was bothered by the well-worn cultural stereotypes, the insistence of the Japaneseness of her bizarre work experiences as an outsider, rather than an approach of a more universal corporate insanity. There are some very funny bits, but as the narrator sinks to deeper levels of job duty degradation, the novella becomes less comic, and more of a glib, gloomy exercise in masochism. The Master by Colm Toibin (2004) **** A beautiful fictional rendering of Henry James, of an artist proficient in observing and reflecting, but not so much in living, which may describe many readers' lives as well. I found the structure a bit choppy and episodic at times. I kept wondering why so little of famous brother William, but Toibin finally delivers in a very poignant gathering with William, a harsh critic of Henry's writings, and William's wife, Alice, for an extended visit at Henry's country home. Very interesting, complex relationships. The novel has whetted my appetite for more late James, either The Golden Bowl or The Wings of the Dove. The Acceptance World (1955) by Anthony Powell **** Novel three of A Dance to the Music of Time. Our narrator, Nick Jenkins, comes more to center stage. He has published a novel, and finally encounters love, albeit illicitly, at least by the standards of the 1920s. There is a long compelling school-reunion set piece that concludes with a scene of such inspired hilarity (I'm laughing as I type) I think it worthy of Chaplin or Keaton at their peak. Metropole by Ferenc Karinthy (1970) ** A professor of Linguistics boards the wrong plane in Budapest, he meant to fly to Helsinki to attend a conference. Instead he arrives in a land he has never heard of, where the inhabitants, who clog every endless street in teeming multitudes, speak a language he has never encountered, and they can speak no other. He's truly trapped, there appears to be no escape. Interesting for awhile, but I soon found it repetitive, akin to watching a man banging his head against a brick wall for a few hours. The Mountain Lion (1947) by Jean Stafford *** I love novels of childhood, a time of life that is so magical, nothing after comes remotely close. And this novel does justice to that idea in highly evocative prose and well-defined characters. Only the ending is just terrible. Stafford in 1971 wrote a one page preface to a new edition in which she inexplicably reveals the ending, as if to apologize for it in advance, and nyrb retains it in their edition. If you read this novel, and it's worth reading for its many felicitous charms, I recommend avoiding the preface.

I read Henry James' The Ambassadors last year and although difficult, the book had a profound effect on me - in the way I perceive myself and the world around me, and in expressing how infinitely mysterious is our existence. I'm currently reading Colm Toibin's The Master, a novel about Henry James. In it, I discovered that the famous quote in The Ambassadors was actually spoken by William Dean Howells to a friend of James' in Paris, Howells regretting he was now too old to truly appreciate all that the city had to offer. "Oh, you are young, be glad of it and live, live all you can, it's a mistake not to. It doesn't so much matter what you do -- but live."

chesil, I am in fact reading Dance on my Kindle, the series just became available as ebooks in the US last month. Before, they were only available in three volumes of four novels, an imposing brick of a book. I read most of the first novel many years ago and then absent-mindedly left it behind in a hotel room while on a business trip, and never bought another copy. I'm zooming through it on the Kindle, my "next page" button getting quite a workout. I'm surprised too by how funny it is, but I have since read that the first part is considered a comedy of manners, then turns darker during the WWII years, ending in a very philosophical mode.

A couple of these are from the tail end of 2010......... Sunflower by Gyula Krudy (1918) **** Suffused with melancholy and desperate love affairs, this novel moves from languid Budapest to a dark countryside steeped in Gothic foreboding. I still haven't fully digested the intense over-the-top Romanticism. The translation is very poetic with a couple of instances of some jarring slang. I especially chuckled when a jovial rustic spouted "hot-diggity-dog." There's a great character, Pistoli. referred to as a Hungarian Falstaff, and his comic downfall dominates the last section of this mysterious novel, it's very moving, even scary, and makes me want to read some more Krudy. Baltasar and Blimunda by Jose Saramago (1982) *** Some beautiful passages, but overall I was disappointed with my first Saramago, the 1998 Nobel Prize winner. A love story set in the 18th century with the building of the Convent of Mafra, now one of Portugal's chief tourist attractions, as a background. An inventor priest enlists the help of the two lovers, Baltasar and Blimuda (she can look into peoples souls, and steal their wills!), in the construction of an early flying machine. It needs to be hush-hush as the Inquisition lingers around every corner. I found the historical characters - the King, the flying priest Bartolomeu, the composer Domenico Scarlatti - far more interesting than the downtrodden B+B, even if endowed with magical powers. And the anti-clerical bits, all the horny friars, grew tedious, the author quarrelling with a God he (an avowed atheist) presumably doesn't believe exists. The Moving Target by Ross Macdonald (1949) *** Macdonald's first Lew Archer mystery, the author so admired in his prime, he once made the front cover review of the Sunday NY Times Book Review when it was considered prestigous, maybe the first for a genre novel. Macdonald was a grandmaster of the hard-boiled simile, so good at it he tended to overdo it. Dysfunctional families and Freudian complexes were his beat, some later novels (The Good-bye Look, Sleeping Beauty) are better, but Target's not bad either. A is for Alibi by Sue Grafton (1982) ** Grafton, a Macdonald disciple, introduced her tough as nails, reclusive female sleuth, Kinsey Millhone, in this initial outing of her alphabet mystery series. No similes here, or artistic pretensions, but a competent enough craftsmanship with one serious stumble, having Kinsey get sexually involved with a prime suspect, something considered strictly taboo in Archer's moral code. A Question of Upbringing by Anthony Powell (1951) **** A Buyer's Market by Anthony Powell (1952) **** The first novel of A Dance to the Music of Time is set in Oxford and London of the 1920s, and the theme of looking back and analyzing the arc and scope of ones life and times, ones friends, lovers and acquaintances, is explored in an addictive prose style with much depth of feeling. The second novel is comedy of the highest level, including the adroit, laugh-out-loud manner in which Powell re-assembles almost all the many characters from the first novel, five years later, into one long night of revelry.

Foreign Bodies by Cynthia Ozick (2010) *** The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith (1954) **** Both these novels reference Henry James' The Ambassadors (an American is sent to Paris to convince another American to return, and the Ambassador is transformed by the experience). The Ozick (she's 82yo!) is partly set in early 1950s Paris teeming with post-war survivors struggling to find their way to someplace else. Bea Nightingale, a middle-aged, divorced NYC high school teacher is dispatched by her long estranged brother, living in LA, to fetch home his prodigal son who has planted himself down in not so gay Paree and shows no intention of returning to the family hearth, and its lucrative business. The exquisite Paris of James' fin de siecle is supplanted by a grimy underneath that his upper class heroes never encountered. Bea is initially unsuccesful in her goal, but her visit sets off a chain of events that threaten to overwhelm her. Whereas James lingers, lingers and lingers some more on every gesture, motive and incident, Ozick moves her plot along at breakneck speed, many characters, incidents, globetrotting, and it's a relatively short novel. David Foster Wallace once named Ozick as one of the two greatest living prose writers in English (Don Delillo the other). I need to gather more evidence. Highsmith is a crime novelist, and in Tom Ripley she created one of the genre's most compelling villains. Tom too resides in NYC, he's a self-loathing, white-collar petty crook, with a penchant for dead-on imitations and improvisations, living unhappily on the fringes of the art world. He once had a fleeting acquaintance with Dickie Greenleaf who has run off to Italy to become a painter, on a generous allowance. Dickie's father, a wealthy shipbuilder, mistakenly believes there was a mucher deeper friendship between the boys and enlists Tom to go to Italy and convince his son to return home. Dickie barely remembers Tom but they do in fact strike up a friendship. Tom doesn't so much want Dickie as a friend, as he wants to be Dickie Greenleaf. Tom is a chameleon, the ingenious lone wolf American foisted on the Continent, a killer at heart, but only if it's absolutely necessary. Highsmith's prose style is deceptively simple, she expertly builds up a ubiquitous tension, like a rubberband slowly stretching but never breaking. She is regarded much more highly in Europe than the USA, her stories interpreted as meditations on alienation, identity and fate. Anthony Minghella made a movie of this novel with Matt Damon as Ripley, Jude Law as Dickie, Gwyneth Paltrow as Dickie's friend Marge, and Philip Seymour Hoffman as the ill-fated Freddie. Perfect casting by me, and the movie is relatively faithful to the book although it does go beyond Highsmith's intentions in attributing Ripley's psychopathic instincts to a repressed homosexuality. The novel was also filmed in the 1960s in France as Purple Noon, with Alain Delon as a very good-looking Ripley. Another Ripley novel (there are five), Ripley's Game, was filmed by Wim Wenders, the bizarre The American Friend, with an equally bizarre Dennis Hopper as Ripley. Also filmed in the 00s by Lilliana Cavani under the books title, with John Malkovich as the most effectively menacing and moody Ripley.

Time to get going..... In 2010 I wanted to mostly stay with one novel by authors new to me, and to read through the available works of Roberto Bolano, both aims accomplished. In total I read 79 novels, 35 were translated, 24 were written by female authors, 59 were by authors new to me, 39 were read on the Kindle. Through the year I became drawn to neglected novels of the past century, and also to novels from other lands, an area of which I was mostly ignorant, excepting the accepted classics. Towards the end of the year I made a concerted effort to read female novelists, men being drawn to male writers, an effort well rewarded. In fact it was the most rewarding year of reading I've ever experienced. Having been a non-fiction reader since my twenties, many decades ago, I re-discovered the delights of fiction I had experienced growing up. For 2011, I plan on building on last years results. My major reading project will be to read all 12 novels of A Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell. Other possibilities include the collected novels of Nobel winner Jose Saramago that are available in English, reading the novels on the short list of the Lost Man Booker Prize, and reading various novels still findable that were published in 1949 the year I entered this crazy cosmos. Enough rambling, on with the reading..........

A chronological list of the novels I read in 2010 with some ratings thrown in........ Lush Life by Richard Price *** Maigret and the Man on the Boulevard by Georges Simenon ** The Girl Who Played With Fire by Stieg Larrson *** The Secret Scripture by Sebastien Barry *** A Person of Interest by Susan Choi ** Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann ** The Night Watch by Sarah Waters *** Red April by Santiago Roncagliolo *** Distant Star by Roberto Bolano **** Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon *** The Likeness by Tana French *** That Awful Mess on the Via Merluna by Carlos Emilio Gadda ***** The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers by Thomas Mullen * Alien Hearts by Guy de Maupassant ***** My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk *** By Night in Chile by Roberto Bolano ***** A Gate at the Stairs by Laurie Moore *** Equal Danger by Leonardo Sciascia **** The Echo Maker by Richard Powers *** Nazi Literature in the Americas by Roberto Bolano *** Ordinary Thunderstorms by William Boyd *** The Darkest Room by Johann Theorin ** A Dark Matter by Peter Straub * The Dream of Perpetual Motion by Derek Palmer *** Man in the Dark by Paul Auster *** Major Pettigrew's Last Stand by Helen Simonson *** Your Face Tomorrow Vol 1 Fever and Spear by Javier Marias **** The Land of Green Plums by Herta Muller *** The Ask by Sam Lipsyte *** Written in Bone by Simon Beckett ** A Scanner Darkly by Philip K Dick **** Sleepless by Charlie Huston *** As a Man Grows Older by Italo Svevo ***** The Confessions of Noa Weber by Gail Hareven ** The History of Mr. Polly by H.G. Wells **** The Silver Swan by Benjamin Black *** The Solitude of Prime Numbers by Paolo Giordano ** Your Face Tomorrow: Dance and Dream Vol 2 by Javier Marias ***** Monsieur Pain by Roberto Bolano *** The Late Mattia Pascal by Luigi Pirandello *** Skylark by Dezso Kosztolanyi ***** Theft: A Love Story by Peter Carey ** The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard **** The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest by Stieg Larsson **** The Twin by Gerbrand Bakker ** The Black Minutes by Martin Solares ** Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson ***** Bonsai by Alejandro Zambra *** Jerusalem by Goncalo M. Tavares *** A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh **** Ghosts by Cesar Aira ** Your Face Tomorrow: Poison, Shadow and Farewell Vol3 by Javier Marias ***** The Babes in the Wood by Ruth Rendell *** Purge by Sofi Oksanen *** Anthropology of an American Girl by Hilary Thayer Hamann ** Amulet by Roberto Bolano *** We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson **** Consequences by Penelope Lively *** Faithful Place by Tana French **** Stoner by John Williams ***** Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon **** The Three Fates by Linda Le ** Witz by Joshua Cohen ** The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt **** A Field of Darkness by Cornelia Read * The Tanners by Robert Walser **** The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen **** The Skating Rink by Roberto Bolano *** Freedom by Jonathan Franzen *** Hadji Murad by Leo Tolstoy ***** The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead **** The Jokers by Albert Cossery *** Elegy For April by Benjamin Black ** Excellent Women by Barbara Pym **** Love in a Cold Climate by Nancy Mitford **** The Ambassadors by Henry James ***** Foreign Bodies by Cynthia Ozick *** The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith **** Sunflower by Gyula Krudy ****

A year end wrapup........ I'll save the last couple of books I'll finish by New Years for my 2011 blog. The novels I got the most out of in 2010, in chronological order as I read them...... That Awful Mess on the Via Merluna by Carlos Emilio Gadda Alien Hearts by Guy de Maupassant By Night in Chile by Roberto Bolano As a Man Grows Older by Italo Svevo Your Face Tomorrow (trilogy) by Javier Marias Skylark by Deszo Kosztolanyi Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson Stoner by John Williams Hadji Murad by Leo Tolstoy The Ambassadors by Henry James If I had to pick just one it would probably be Alien Hearts, a beautiful and poignant exploration of the human condition we term romantic love, delivered in a seamless and highly poetic translation. A couple I found difficult - The Ambassadors and That Awful Mess.. - I think it is important to exercise one's reader's chops from time to time on a challenge, as often, and especially in these two novels, it can be deeply rewarding. And then there are the novels of whose ultimate literary value I may have been uncertain, but didn't really care, as I found them such enjoyable reads.......... The Likeness by Tana French The Girl Who Played With Fire/The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets Nest by Stieg Larsson We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson Love in a Cold Climate by Nancy Mitford Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon (my favorite read of the year) And, I still love my Kindle, highly recommended. For 2011, I'm kicking around some reading goals. Top of the list as of now is Anthony Powell's 12 volume A Dance to the Music of Time, reading one volume per month.

It's been awhile............. The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead Stead's 1940 autobiographical novel about her bizarre childhood (highly touted by Jonathan Franzen on his Freedom book tour) is at turns hilarious, scary and ultimately tragic. A Father who lorded over his many children, narcissistic, occasionally benevolent but mostly oppressive. A description of a marital battlefield whose arguments make those of George and Martha's in Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolf seem tame. Stead was once a perennial Nobel possibility, and kudos to Franzen for drawing attention to this largely forgotten but very remarkable novelist. The Jokers by Albert Cossery The irony in this comic novel of a group of anarchists who bring down their bumbling governor by lodging a campaign of overpraising him, drips off of every page. Unfortunately, Cossery's misogyny is barely muted and it leaves a sour taste. Elegy For April by Benjamin Black The third and least of the Quirke mysteries, perfunctory and rather worn out, with a yucky incest theme. The first novel in the series, Christine Falls, is the one to read, and, hopefully, if he continues with the series, he returns to the more expansive world of that novel. Excellent Women by Barbara Pym Middle aged spinster 1950s, churchgoer, sympathetic confidante to those with problems, in her spare time looks after elderly women with no means, heavily involved in the good works at her church - this is Pym's (or maybe society's) definition of an excellent woman. Nothing much happens, the meaning is in the details, this engrossing comedy of manners struck me as well above average. Love in a Cold Climate by Nancy Mitford One of the most entertaining novels I've read this year, this time it's the English high society being skewered, between the two World Wars. Simply great characterizations of a world Mitford knew well, and if you are familiar with the Mitford family history (what a history!) you'll enjoy it even more. The Ambassadors by Henry James The first of James' long novels (his personal favorite) I've ever been able to complete. The first half was a real struggle, I resorted to reading difficult passages aloud as I believe James dictated these later novels, and that helped. I zoomed through the second half, underneath all the erudition and the artificial and theatrical world he creates, lies a master storyteller, and I have spent an inordinate amount of time the last few days pondering the fate of his fictional characters.

I'm in the homestretch of The Man Who Loved Children, just an incredible novel from 1940, though I don't think anyone would use that title nowadays. I hope to finish it this weekend as I will be following bibliofreakblog.com and their November Novella challenge. I'm aiming at Level III - two novellas a week, so I'm busily choosing my eight. Hope to throw in a couple of heavyweights I've always avoided, catch them in their briefer moments, like Don DeLillo or Thomas Bernhard.

I keep forgetting this one is out now. LeCarre is one of my all-time faves. Kindle price $14.99 hardcover $14.98! I don't know what these publishers are thinking.

Freedom by Jonathan Franzen Franzen is a writer of talent, scope and ambition and I found Freedom surprisingly old-fashioned in its realism, and in its willingness to engage with a mainstream audience. (I haven't read The Corrections and knew little about Franzen outside of the Oprah brouhaha.) This is a family saga starring Walter and Patty Berglund who are described and analyzed every which way, and then some. We follow their stormy marraige from college days to retirement. Whether you like the book or not hinges mightily on whether you find them endearingly human, or shallow and annoyingly self-absorbed. It's also a love triangle, for it seems that Patty has another life-long paramour, Richard, an unreliable on-the-fringes rock star, who also happens to be Walter's best friend. Although an engrossing read, I was far too often reminded of daytime soaps, reality TV and internet porn (the sex scenes are a hoot). Franzen says he isn't writing for the ages, and there's a surfeit of contemporary references and "the way we live now" relationships. The action moves along, Franzen is never boring, and many of the minor characters are spot-on in their likeness to type. I just wasn't very clear on what Franzen was trying to say, the themes seemed confused, but then that may be the theme, that the end result of our personal freedom is often confusion, and too often anger and despair. Hadji Murad by Leo Tolstoy This is Tolstoy's last novel, really closer to a novella at only 140 pages, that he spent the last ten years of his life composing. Murad was a legendary Chechnayan warrior who defects to the Russians (Tolstoy as a young soldier shook his hand) and then is caught in a tug of war with his former leader who has imprisoned his family. The novel covers alot of ground and many characters for so brief a length. Whereas Franzen huffs and puffs for over 500 pages to try and make his main characters clear and understandable, Tolstoy in a few paragraphs creates indelible portraits of precision and poignancy. It's about as sublime as fiction gets. coming soon....... The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead The Mountain Lion by Jean Stafford The Jokers by Albert Cossery

Kindle's outdoor advert is meant to emphasize that the e-ink it employs in it's device is eminently readable in bright sunlight - unlike backlit computer screens which are not. Much easier on the eyes than book ink, as well, outdoors.

BookJumper - My misremembering names of characters is a longstanding tradition, Mrs Malaprop resides in my sub-conscious. pontalbo - Humbert is indeed a useful reference point, maybe the best unreliably sympathetic narrator of them all. He's a monster, but still.... aesthetic bliss - thats a toughie to talk about, it's so subjective. Nabokov is again applicable, he pretty much popularized the phrase, his novels the supreme examples. For me it occurs when an artist like Jackson uses words as a conjurer would, takes the stuff of the times she lives in, the happenstances of her life, and molds the details into a compelling fable that describes, but does not explain, retaining the inherent mystery of all things. Jackson could have written a realistic novel of a harried housewife, anguished and anxious, battling addictions and mental illness, trying to raise a gaggle of kids, at war with the prejudiced people of the town she lived in, Bennington Vermont (also the setting of Donna Tartt's The Secret History). It might have been a good story, but possibly dated and forgettable. Instead she wrote Castle, utilizing the macabre elements of gothic literature, but not its formulas, full of surprises, and said it all anyways, obliquely, and memorably. But enough of my babbling. Heres a really good description of ae-bl I found somewhere in cyberspace -- With an electric sigh .... one inhales lyricism, poeticism; this is the proverbial aesthetic bliss..... described as neither happy, nor sad, but a tingling contentedness after closing a book and setting it gently down, squeezing the covers together, reveling in this invoked catharsis.

The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowden A teenage girl, Portia, recently orphaned, comes to live with her half-brother and his lovely, but jaded wife in 30s London. Portia has lived a peripatetic, but very happy life with her parents in southern France, but must now adjust to the cynical machinations of big city life and adult society. She does not adjust well. By modern standards, and, indeed, even the standards of her times, Portia is a bit dense. She trusts her heart, so you care about her, but sometimes you might feel like giving her a swift kick. Luckily, the brilliance of this novel is not so much in the theme as in the details - precisely defined characters, compelling scenes of dialogue, and a vivid sense of place. And Portia is a true original, whether you enjoy the novel or not depends a great deal on how much sympathy she can elicit from you. The Tanners by Robert Walser Simon, in his early 20s, continously moves from menial job to a more menial job, from one seedy hotel to another, from picturesque country villages to lakeside cities in early 20th century Switzerland. He's sort of a good-natured Bartleby, he proclaims a resounding NO to the conventions and expectations of society, but he loves so many of the trappings of being alive - the exuberance of a long walk on a beautiful day; appreciating the ethereal power of the opposite sex; forming deep friendships (that never abide); studying the interesting panoply of people parading by on the boulevard of a lazy Sunday afternoon. Simon's many job interviews are a hoot. He waxes poetic, with evident sincerity, on his impeccable qualifications and his overwhelming desire to perform the most mundane duties for his prospective employer. Invariably the employer is so taken back by Simon's over-the-top performance he gives him a shot. In two weeks time, Simon will be gone, disillusioned, he feels he deserves something better than this meaningless waste of time. Underneath the light airy prose and the quixotic ramblings lies a distinct foreboding of never belonging anywhere, being of the world but never quite in it. The novel is highly auto-biographical, Walser led such a life, he became a minor literary sensation in Berlin while young, then disappeared from sight, discovered decades later in a mental asylum, he spent the final thirty years of his life there, though no one ever considered him the least bit insane. He had found his refuge. The Skating Rink by Roberto Bolano One of Bolano's shorter works, not quite up to the high standard set by Distant Star and By Night in Chile, but still mighty good. A social portrait of a seaside Spanish town during a touristy summer. An ice skating rink is surreptiously erected by a town official with embezzled township funds so that the local figure skating star, her career in decline, can practice for a comeback. The town official is of course hopelessly in love with the skater. There's a murder committed, in the center of the rink, with an eerily beautiful description of the slender rivers of blood flowing across the ice. Mostly the novel is about lost souls haunted by their dashed dreams, trying to find some peace, Bolano's sustaining theme. A Field of Darkness by Cornelia Read A thriller recommended by Tana French, no less, one of my faves. I can't figure out why the recommendation, as this novel is packed with everything Tana's books aren't- cliches, smarminess, cardboard characters, limpid prose. I didn't even get any thrills. still coming soon.......... Freedom by Jonathan Franzen (surprisingly, I'm not enjoying this so far)

The responses to "Castle" have been so good, that I delayed saying something about it forlornly hoping that I could find something interesting to add. I think one of Jackson's prodigious accomplishments is to allow the reader sympathy for Merricat, everything she says and does has a certain logic, to her at least, and we forget or don't allow ourselves to consider that Merricat is psychotic, and a mass murderess to boot. In this aspect I'm reminded of Psycho, a movie released only a couple of years before Castle was published. Norman Bates, mild-mannered, good-looking, wouldn't hurt a fly, is the male flip side of Merricat, he just wants to stay at home with "Mother" in his gothic castle on the hill. Both Jackson and Hitchcock were creatures of the Freudian Age, they were fascinated by the puzzle of evil behavior, what caused it, how it manifests itself. Merricat fears the outside world, more specifically, the dangerous intrusion of the outside world, as did Jackson. Here's a quote I found from her: "...I have always loved to use fear, to take it and comprehend it and make it work and consolidate a situation where I was afraid and take it whole and work from these...I delight in what I fear. The 'Castle' is not about two women...it is about my being afraid and afraid to say so, so much afraid that a name in a book can turn me inside out." In The Novel: An Alternative History: Beginnings to 1600 by Stephen Moore, he defines a successful novel as "essentially a delivery system for aesthetic bliss". I'm not sure what Jackson was ultimately up to in Castle, it strikes me as so intensely personal and mysterious, but it sure does meet Moore's definition.

I have about 60 pages of Roberto Bolano's The Skating Rink left, it's very good, and then on to Jonathan Franzen's Freedom.

The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt An intriguing premise - single Mom with brilliant son, she home schools him, he learns 20 languages by age 11, studies physics, philosophy, mathematics, judo. Mom worries that he has no male figures to emulate, so she shows him Akira Kurosawa's movie The Seven Samurai over and over, thinking that it properly displays the manly virtues of loyalty, bravery and self-sacrifice. The problem is that the son wishes to know the identity of his father (a one-night stand for Mom) but she's not telling. The last section of the novel covers the boy's Samurai-like quest for his father, or more telling, who he wishes his father would be. There are some deep philosophical questions raised along the way, some I'm far too dense to properly identify, but one dilemma I found interesting was the value of isolation in endless knowledge, versus the value of engagement with the world around you. This is not a difficult read, I found it highly entertaining, with some memorable characters. The Three Fates by Linda Le Another interesting premise - three Vietamese girls, living in Paris (their grandmother whisked them away during the fall of Saigon) anticipate the arrival of their Father, who they haven't seen since, from Vietnam. Unfortunately, this short novel is told in extended metaphors, the main one being King Lear and his three daughters, but there are many more, all tinged with bitterness, and it soon becomes a tedious slog. Witz by Joshua Cohen Cohen is prodigiously talented, and that is nothing to be sniffed at. But he wishes to display it in every paragraph, sentence and phrase. He smothers you, and the plot, in his virtuosity. By the end I felt I was reading gibberish. Some people hail this book as a masterpiece, I found it exhausting and impenetrable. coming soon...... Freedom by Jonathan Franzen

I turned 61 today, Friday the 13th! It's difficult to believe, time goes by faster and faster the older you get. 11 months and 18 days to early retirement, lots of time to read then.

Faithful Place by Tana French Frank Mackey, undercover cop guru in French's previous novel The Likeness, takes center stage in her new thriller, a story of a boy and a girl in love, trying to escape from the prison of their drab, hopeless Dublin childhoods, and from their highly dysfunctional families, eloping to London on the midnight boat. Only the girl, Rosie, never shows, disappears without a trace. Twenty years later her suitcase is found, and Frank gets sucked back into the ashes of his memories, to finally solve the mystery that has haunted his life. French has quickly joined the first rank of suspense writers, her stories tinged with emotional truth, exploring the fragility of the ties that bind us to others, especially to those with whom we are closest. Stoner by John Williams This novel from the 1960s (having nothing to do with drugs) got a recent boost when Tom Hanks proclaimed it one of his all-time favorites. I tip my hat to Hanks' literary taste, for this is indeed a remarkable book, telling the life story of an ordinary man who falls in love with literature and teaching, but whose life, in every other aspect - marraige, professional, fatherhood - is littered with disappointment. Williams views this man as a hero for his loyalty, integrity, his perserverance against the odds of poor fortune, and his ability to still find meaning in his singular enthusiasm. All the characters and scenes are described perfectly in crystal clear prose. Williams only wrote two other novels (Augustus about Ancient Rome, and Butcher's Crossing on the Old West) and I'm eager to get to them. Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon Set in a fictional LA seaside community circa 1970, Pynchon's latest has lots to do with drugs, and sex, and rock-n-roll, and a counter culture reeling from the Manson murders, Tricky Dick in the White House, Ronald Reagan in the Governor's mansion, and the Silent Majority on the rise. It's been termed "Pynchon lite" by the pundits, a detective story sticking close to the genre conventions, it's short, accessible, but still covers all the themes that have obsessed Pynchon these many years. I found it hilarious, and quite moving, an elegy for a lost moment when so much seemed possible. But then, I'm like a total fan of the man from way back, you might not want to trust my opinion. coming soon.... The Last Samurai by Helen De Witt (nothing to do with the Tom Cruise movie) The Three Fates by Linda Le The Tanners by Robert Walser and, maybe, someday, the 800pg Witz by Joshua Cohen, 60% through, the ultimate homework assignment. .

I finished Tana French's new one Faithful Place last night, a terrific mystery novel, Ms French is getting better and better with this, her third book. I can't wait to see what direction she goes next, she likes to take secondary but important characters from her previous and make them the main focus of her next. I started Stoner by John Williams, very good so far.

I finished my requisite 160 pages of Witz over the weekend (480 more to go) so I'm going with something less challenging, but hopefully very good- Tana French's new one Faithful Place. .

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is the first in the series, Played With Fire the second. It's a great reading experience, any which way you slice it. .

Consequences by Penelope Lively A young woman sits on a park bench in 1930s London, crying. A young man, a stranger, sits close by, sketching ducks. He looks up at the crying woman, their eyes meet, and something wonderful happens. Thus begins this multi-generational novel, describing the consequences of that chance meeting. Much ground is covered in only 250 pages, it moves swiftly, right up to the new millenium. Everyone is properly decent, well-behaved, leading to a paucity of dramatic conflict. Daughter and granddaughter find love, have losses, and adjust to time's relentless march. Some beautiful prose atones for the hurried plotting. Amulet by Roberto Bolano Bolano takes on the narrative voice of a woman, one Auxilio Lacouture, the "Mother of Mexican Poetry". In 1968 the Mexican army invades the capitol's university. Auxilio is in the ladies room at the onset, her presence undetected by the invaders, she decides to remain in hiding, without food, as a protest, for many days, and thereby becoming a heroine to the young protesters when the soldiers finally leave. This novel meanders through Auxilio's memory of that event, and what was to come for the romantic generation that had so much promise, frittered away by disappointment and self-interest. Bolano loved to describe his character's dreams and visions, and this novel ends with one of his best, hordes of young students marching together through a glorious landscape, singing the Amulet of the title, heading for some barely glimpsed but very real abyss. We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson The Peruvian novelist Vargas Llosa described his experience of reading Stieg Larsson's Millenium trilogy as "being demolished by the cyclonic force of story". I like that, it aptly describes my experience of the trilogy, and also of Jackson's phenomenally eerie and quite insane Castle. I'll not describe the plot, in fear of compromising any enjoyment for those who haven't read it, just go ahead and read it, it's short, hypnotic, and haunting. .

Yesterday, during my Witz break, I devoured We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson in one gulp, with just a short brunch break. I just started Consequences by Penelope Lively, which may take me a while longer to read.