Ethan reads 2011

[ethan]

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..........

Edited February 6, 2011 by ethan

[ethan]

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.

Edited January 10, 2011 by ethan

[ethan]

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.

[chesilbeach]

My OH bought the first few books of A Dance to the Music of Time almost 20 years ago, and I don't think he ever got round to reading them, but I keep seeing them up on the shelf and thinking I must try them, even though I actually know very little about them! I had no idea they were so funny, ethan, but you've tempted me with your comments and I'll think more seriously about starting the series when I've reduced my existing TBR! I might have a look and see if I can get them for my kindle.

[ethan]

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.

Edited January 16, 2011 by ethan

[ethan]

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.

Edited February 6, 2011 by ethan