Books I Read December 4th, 2016

Life continues apace. I spent Thanksgiving burning off calories by chasing my nephew around my parent's house, and reading about Nazis for an article I was thinking of writing. Back in the city the temperature is nearly appropriate to the season, and it would require a deeply sick person not to feel some dim twinge of joy at being able to spend the Christmas season in New York. Happy to report I am not (yet quite so diseased.

The Fountain Overflows By Rebecca West – I consider Rebecca West's brilliant, idiosyncratic, fifteen hundred page pseudo-travelogue Black Lamb and Gray Falcon to be one of the great works of 20th century literature, a book of abiding genius, one which inspired me as a youth and continues to do so to the present day. Despite this reverence I have never actually gotten around to reading anything else by the Dame, in part because she is not particularly well read any longer (to the shame of the modern literary establishment) and thus it is relatively difficult to but probably mostly because I regard the aforementioned with so much reverence that it was unrealistic to suppose I would enjoy anything else she had written as much. Nor would I suggest that this novel reaches such peaks of brilliance, but then again very few things ever have. The story of a family of (mostly) misguided geniuses – a mother of faded musical genius, two daughters blessed with similar gifts, a mercurial father who's utter failures as a parent do not cancel out an intellectual and moral brilliance. It is rich in its detail of an England before World War I, an England long vanished, of its mores and customs, of its follies and its small joys which will never again return. I confess it took me a while to get into, but I was glad I stuck with it by the end. West is a unique talent, and if it is somewhat less evident here than it is in Black Lamb etc, still this is more than worth your time. The writing is fabulous, the observations of true merit, and the storyline, which seems at first to sprawl out a bit pointlessly, comes together gloriously in the end.

Diary of a Man in Despair by Friedrech Reck – A work of abiding moral brilliance, I hope to discuss it a bit more in the future.

The Snows of Yesteryear by Gregor von Rezzori – So I read Ermine in Czernopol a few months back, and it was one of those books that I didn't exactly enjoy but which made me want to read something else by the author. Rezzori, a German-speaking mutt hailing from what is now a rather barren and homogenous portion of Ukraine but what was, before the fall of the Dual Monarchy, a vibrant ethnic stew of Eastern Europeans, essentially does a Proust here, recalling, in vivid and glorious detail, the events of his childhood. Framed as recollections of five people who played critical roles in his childhood, his wet nurse, his mother, his father, his sister, and a governess, Rezzori takes us to a world in its death throes, dismantled by World War I and about to be wiped away completely by World War II. It is an audacious task, to mimic one of history's supreme literary luminaries, but Rezzori does not shame himself. The writing is brilliant, a bit flowery perhaps but that's part of the fun of the thing, its loving descriptions of a vanished world. He manages to walk the most glorious tightrope here between romanticism and cold-eyed cynicism, and his descriptions of his loved ones, all long dead by the time he was writing this book, are loving but entirely unsentimental. These were deeply flawed people, as was Rezzori (as are all of us (let's not get off topic)), and though he looks back upon them with a love only deepened by time he in unsparing in his criticism of their follies, and his follies, and the follies of the age. Haunting and beautiful, one of my favorites of 2016.

Fat City by Leonard Gardner – This was a cheery one. About a cast of hard luck sorts trying to make a bit of money in the squalid, despairing world of semi-pro boxing in southern California in the early or mid 60's, I guess. An uncompromising though not cruel view of an impoverished sub class, living on the bare fringes of society. Actually sort of an unintentional theme of books this month has been a strong sense of place, and this one is no exception. I'm actually not entirely sure of Gardner's background but one feels not only that the specifics of this are right, the worn gyms and the routine of the fruit and vegetable pickers who cannot find more solid work, but that the spirit of the characters, their misery and the of necessity endurance with which they survive it. There's a funny joke in the intro to the effect that Gardner is a real writer's writer sort, which is indeed true – the bleakness of this vision it not one likely to find favor with many readers, but those who persevere will be rewarded. It's also not real long.  

Books I Read November 21st, 2016

I'd rather just not go into the whole thing right now, if it's all the same to you, thanks so much. Maybe I'll have something to say about it later. I will see my nephew for Thanksgiving, from our calls I gather he has mastered the chaining together of words to make phrases and sentences, is being indoctrinated into that happy cult of language which sets as superior to the beasts of the field (and the air as well, though some of them can comfortably mimic it.) He is ever-laughing, my nephew, and often dressed in seasonal outfits. That is to say I have things for which to be grateful. I hope that the same is true of you, reading this.

City of Light, City of Poison by Holly Tucker – A visitor – the inhabitant of a sad, distant metropolis, one bound in fog and rain 15/16ths of the year, one talking constantly of past glories, dead poets, half-forgotten heroes, a city in which no amount of money will enable you to find remotely decent Mexican food, and I'm not even talking great Mexican food, just, you know, a tolerable fucking quesadilla – anyway, was shocked to be introduced to the New York custom of stoop side recycling, that is to say, putting something you do not want outside and returning to find that it is no longer there, whatever it is that you have left, and however brief your sojourn, as if the entirety of the five boroughs was inhabited by a race of morlock like creatures, cowering in the sewers and living off our refuse. Suddenly this ritual seems less charming.

But no, it's nothing to do with any of that, and only that there is always someone here in the city who views your refuse as prize. Passing through a corner of Brownstone Brooklyn, coming across a discarded library I forced upon my aforementioned visitor the collected short works of Graham Greene, a hardcover the weight of a brick that he graciously accepted. I took this one, meanwhile, not realizing at first that it was an ARC copy, that is to say, not really meant for public consumption. But by the time I realized I was too far along to stop reading. Anyway, I promise I'll go out and buy a copy of it when it comes out next spring, and if you wanted to do the same also that would go some way towards assuaging the bloody remnants of my conscience. Thank you.

End of prelude. This is a thoroughly enjoyable work of popular history, dealing with a wave of poisonings which shocked the court of Louis the XIV, and which, rumor long held, involved his most intimate acquaintances. Drawn largely from the secret files of the chief of the Paris police, Ms. Tucker has a sharp eye for the sort of vivid detail which engrosses a reader, and the backdrop – of high society and of the very lowest slums of the Parisian underworld – is devilishly entertaining. Take this with a grain of salt because my commercial instincts are unerringly bad, but it wouldn't surprise me to see this being a break out hit in about 9 months.
 

The Hawkline Monster by Richard Brautigan – Right. The last of these Brautigan shorts, and I think my least favorite. Not that it's bad, it's not at all. It's weird and savage, a truly original work of genre fiction, sort of a sci-fi True Grit, about two murderers who get hired by two sisters to kill a monster their professor father had created in their laboratory. I liked it, and its influence is clear (Sister's Brothers, lots of other books, I'm looking at you) but for my money Brautigan's genre pastiche is less entertaining then the raw humor of his prose. Not surprisingly I enjoyed Confederate more than this or Babylon. Still, the three of them collected present a strong argument for spending more time with Brautigan, something I plan on doing once I read about two dozen other books in the queue.

 

Barbarians at the Gate – Another winner I pulled up off a stoop. Oh man, this was fun – like a true life Bonfire of the Vanities, an intimate portrait of the leveraged buy out of RJR Nabisco, business at the height of the Reagan Era, just before the crash. Riveting, just absolutely riveting, I was up at three in the morning learning about the development of junk bonds. Readers of Game of Thrones and these sorts of world spanning epics will feel right at home with the large cast of corporate raiders, dishonest bankers, arrogant business leaders, masters of the universe politicking against one another endlessly, driven mad by greed and sheer machismo. Strong recommendation.

Aegypt by John Crowley – I appreciate Crowley as a truly original writer of speculative fiction, innovative and influential in. Little, Big and Engine Summer I regard very, very highly, particularly the former which I think probably belongs in the first ranks of 20th century novels, but I confess I found this to be the sort of books one more endures than enjoys. Aegypt (excuse the incorrect spelling, I don't feel like researching how to make the A and the e come together properly) is the story of a failed historian who becomes convinced that there is an alternative history of the world, one which exists in myth and the collected unconscious. An alternate history which, if it was put down in words, might see the return of magic and the realignment of the world. As this book is the first of a tetrology, a fact I belatedly discovered about two-thirds of the way through, our hero does not actually write this book, nor even start it, but just sort of thinks a lot about starting it, sharpens his pencils and whatnot. I'm not kidding as much as I'd like. Even a sympathetic reader is likely to find this immensely dull in parts. When Crowley can reign himself in a bit he is an absolutely first rate writer, but there is sadly not much of that restraint on evidence here. The text is always spiraling, higher and higher, a conscious and deliberate affectation but one which grows exhausting all the same. And while Crowley eschews most of the conventions of the genre – there are no villains, and the only conflict to speak of is existential – he remains faithful to that most loathsome of errors common to works of fantasy, that is to say, not having an ending. There is clearly a lot of genius here, Crowley's is an intricate and brilliant mind, and I imagine if I stuck with the next three books there'd be a pay off. But I also can't help but feel it's unlikely I'll ever make the attempt. Who knows.

Books I Read November 7th, 2016

Right. The last week! It was Halloween, that was fun, I stuck to my usual Halloween tradition of going to Dive Bar in park slope and drinking something seasonal and watching ninja turtles etc. strut down the avenue in search of chocolate. Working like a dog, but towards something, you know? Or don't we all think. I had a friend from out of town visit over the Weekend, and got to do that thing where you walk around your neighborhood and go, 'oh, this old place? Yes, we do have a Korean-Fusion restaurant.' So that was fun. Is something going on tomorrow? Gosh, I can hardly remember.. No, you're the one checking 538 twice-hourly. Shut up, no one even likes you.

Peace by Gene Wolfe – Yeah, so I re-read this over Halloween, and I've got thoughts. I'm going to type them up and see if I can't get someone to publish them. In the meantime, read my first review of it, here...

Speed Boat by Renata Adler – Wow. Holy shit. Woo-hoo. Similar expressions of enthusiastic delight which don't translate as well read as they do spoken. I loved, loved this book, even slightly more I think then I did Pitch Dark, which I would also very highly recommend. There is no narrative to speak of, the text consisting of very brief stories, observations and one-liners, provided courtesy of our loosely drawn protagonist, a reporter and jet setter pushing towards middle age in the early 1970's, trying to make sense of the wreckage of her youth. The disparate passages collectively offer a vivid view of the (admittedly narrow) world of the highly educated, culturally sophisticated, faintly progressive east coast bourgeoisie, and they do so with the most masterful comic touch. In her deftness and rhythm, as well as her general savagery of tone, Adler reminds one of of Kingsley Amis and even, bear with us kids cause the praise doesn't get much higher, Waugh himself. Sentences veers back and forth against themselves, an anarchic mess of sustained hilarity but with the most admirable precision of language. Adler is unsparing in the pretensions of her set, but not embittered or hateful – they are silly, arrogant, sad, clever, funny, slightly more decent than you might expect. It's not really like I keep a running list of these things but I have to say with this book Adler has entered the tiniest inner circle of my favorite authors.

Dreaming of Babylon By Richard Brautigan – Brautigan's gonzo comic voice over with the bare bones of a classic Hammet/Chandler PI plot. If I don't write much about it that's because there's not a ton to write, other than that Brautigan is laugh out loud funny, and this was a delight.

Unwrapped Sky by Rjurik Davidson – A nemesis is someone whose funeral you would attend in a black suit with red hands, mourning quietly and without histrionics, tossing your handful of dirt upon the coffin, offering honest condolences to the bereaved. In that spirit, and with his blessing, I will hereby offer an honest review of Rjurik Davidson's Unwrapped Sky (my second, in fact, though the first was tendered without having actually read the book.) Doing so goes against my own instincts and the code of our shared guild, one of the tenants of which is, to my mind at least, that a non-professional review ought to be entirely and unequivocally positive. In an age where novels are rated along side coffee machines the slightest expression of dislike echoes loud as a thunderclap, and it is a cruel bastard indeed who would do anything to lessen the likelihood of a sale.

I suppose I am that cruel bastard.

To mention all of the ways in which Davidson eschews standard fantasy tropes is to damn the novel with faint praise; at the same time, they deserve a brief mention, if only because it is sadly still so rare. Here you will find no golden children, no forgotten sons of gods, no magic swords, no Tolkien-inspired races, and no satanic analogues. The themes being handled are of weight and import, are more than the standard sad masculine power fantasies which tend to define most of the other books being shelved in next to his, 'what if I could shoot fire out of my hands!?! Everyone would have to listen to me then!'

Knowing Rjurik, I expected all of this going in, and so accord him no particular points for not putting out drivel. Where I do credit the man, where the book does deserve praise, is first and foremost in its lively and original world building. Davidson has a fertile if rococo imagination, and innumerable small bits of Caeli-Amur proved memorable to me – the watery wonderland in which an aristocrat takes his siren ingenue, the endless shifting castle of the House of Technic. The minotaurs were were cool. The magic system is likewise deftly sketched, believable without being intrusively elaborate, and from one specialist to another, I tip my hat. Within the framework of a relatively traditional narrative, Davidson likewise manages to juke left a couple of times when I figured he was moving right. The secret plan of the demonic overlords (I'm not going to look up the real names of these, he is my enemy after all) was weird and cool and different, and so was the resolution of the Boris storyline.

Davidson is, of course, an unreconstructed Marxist (isn't that adorable! It's like someone wearing a cowboy outfit, I want to take a selfie to chronicle the anachronism) and there are points in the novel which will seem, shall we say, over-familiar to anyone with a passing knowledge of the Russian revolution. But Davidson's politics, though informing his world, do not become didactic or deform the story. His revolutionaries are flawed, imperfect figures – they would not make it past the scrutiny of the Politburo without serious revision.

Enough with the kindnesses, lets make with the knives. When I told Rjurik I was reading his book he suggested I read his second. This is a common reaction among clever people to their first book (Get me drunk some time and ask me to name all the things wrong with A Straight Razor Cure, I could write a book of all but equal length). I felt at times that he relied too much on inner monologues to express the point of view of his characters, rather than revealing it in some subtler fashion. His scenes of physical violence did not thrill me, though it must be said that scenes of physical violence very rarely do.

On balance, the pros far outweighed the cons, from my POV at least, though it's only fair to point out that I am more or less the exact target audience for this, as someone who has read Victor Serge and also knows the feel of a D20. Rjurik and I hold quite similar slates of obsession –can a person truly be called free, given the historic circumstances which limit our choices? What is personal morality in a world going rapidly off a cliff? Are human relationships defined exclusively by power?

It's worth your time to ask these questions in the company of Maxamillian, Kata et al. I guess what I'm saying is this – if you were to read one pasty, bald-faced Marxist, you would be better off picking this up than say, Perdido Street Station.

Your move, Rjurik.

Conversations with Beethoven by Sanford Friedman – Yeah...not bad. The conceit itself is clever enough – the collected jottings of the relatives, friends and acquaintances of Beethoven in the year before his death, after his hearing had depreciated to the point where all communication needed to be written down and passed to him. As Beethoven mostly spoke his responses, our picture of the maestro is drawn largely in negative space, that is to say, from the way the other characters interact with him. What develops is a portrait of an irascible, tormented genius, in whom kindness, wit and self-sacrifice are intermingled with hypocrisy, misogyny, and bitterness. The nuanced depiction of the characters, each offering a contrary perspective on each other and on the maestro himself, works excellently, but the individual personalities do not sparkle particularly. I couldn't help but compare it to other polyphonic novels I've read, in which I felt the individual perspectives to be more captivating.

My Pointless Contribution

For long years I have held in high reverence Dame Rebecca West's indelible masterpiece Black Lamb and Gray Falcon. In it, West turns an excursion through Yugoslavia on the eve of WWII into a grand meditation on humanity's shared instinct for self-destruction, and on the continual need to resist that urge. It is marvelous, beautifully written and filled with stark profundity, and there is one line in particular I would like to share with you here:

Only part of us is sane: only part of us loves pleasure and the longer day of happiness, wants to live to our nineties and die in peace, in a house that we built, that shall shelter those who come after us. The other half of us is nearly mad. It prefers the disagreeable to the agreeable, loves pain and its darker night despair, and wants to die in a catastrophe that will set back life to its beginnings and leave nothing of our house save its blackened foundations.

I generally keep my political opinions to myself, and would prefer others did likewise. The internet has given everyone a very large microphone, but few use it to any valuable purpose. Social media is a continuous tableau of remarkable stupidity; the left is sanctimonious and unoriginal; the right, coarse-minded and thoroughly mad. I sincerely hope you can forgive me for adding to this cacophony. At the very least, please understand that I am not operating under the misimpression that this post will have the slightest effect on the votes or beliefs of anyone reading it. It is simply that we have reached a point where one wishes to state clearly where one stands.

Hillary Clinton is a political operator without the slightest honest conviction, trimming her sails to the day's winds. Her indisputable intellect and long experience have sadly not led to any great capacity for judgment, and as Secretary of State she was often prey to that affection, seemingly ubiquitous among our elected officials, for dropping bombs on distant countries to no useful purpose. As a rote supporter of the status quo she will do very little to alleviate the worst problems facing our society, and is more than likely to introduce a few more on her own.

She is, none the less, so far superior to her opponent as to make any comparison between them seem as between an over-cooked meal and a bottle of undiluted arsenic. Trump is so utterly unfit for the position of President that any notion of giving it to him can only be seen as a manifestation of that madness of which Dame West spoke, or perhaps as singularly effective two finger salute by a relentlessly disenfranchised portion of the American population. Tragically, he is only the symptom and not the cause of the long-growing political rifts which exist in our society, rifts resulting from a rapid collapse of common standards among an electorate held together chiefly by material wealth. He represents a disorder which goes far beyond either party and points rather towards a general, probably unsolvable, trend.

Under these circumstances, it it easy to feel that any individual act of civic participation is irrelevant and even slightly absurd– who voted in the last election for consul, one wonders, depositing a ballot with the Vandals knocking at the gates of Rome? This apathy is surely folly; we are called upon to influence events to whatever dim degree we are able. Recall that we are never but a few precious steps from the precipice; there is no guarantee of tomorrow's prosperity. Perhaps these elections pass as a peculiar blip in American history, a minor embarrassment which our children, happy and prosperous, laugh about on late night comedy shows. Perhaps future generations will look back upon us with contempt and sorrow, cursing us for failing to properly steward their inheritance. If it is the latter, I would like it to be known that I am for maintaining the house, to return to Dame West's quote, and perhaps even starting in on some modest repairs if at all possible.

My personal dislike of her having not the slightest bearing on the matter, I have cast my vote for Hillary Clinton.

PS. I will not be responding to comments.

Books I Read October 30th, 2016

A fine week, a solid week, largely uneventful apart from the unseasonable heat. I finished a draft of a book you might one day read, and an idea for another came in hard Monday afternoon, muscling aside its siblings, demanding attention. I ate and drank well, I walked distances, I saw interesting things, I read well (as you'll see). Depending on tomorrow, next week, next month, slave to the perverse subjectivity of memory, I may well look back upon the 17th to the 23rd of October as the quiet peak of my happiness on earth, walking blissfully and all unknowing the final few steps towards the precipice. In retrospect, given the crushing weight of misfortune looming ahead, I might have enjoyed it more. Ah, well, there's always next week. Or, potentially, not.

Editors Note: I wrote the above and most of the following the night before my REDACTED went into the hospital for REDACTED, hence the broadly apocalyptic theme. But REDACTED turned out fine, oh happy day. Anyway, excuse last week's absence, I promise to be more consistent in the future, but not really.

The Letter Killers Club by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky – Regarding a group of brilliant novelists who have forsaken their craft to devote their energy to weekly meetings of the eponymous society, during which each tells a story that is meant to in some way upend traditional narrative conventions. The short stories themselves are peculiar but broadly entertaining, most containing a speculative element of some kind – probably the most memorable is about a government-engineered virus which eliminates free will, a clear predecessor to Orwell and Huxley, though coming out more than a generation earlier (roughly coterminous with Zamyatin's We). I dug them mostly, and the meta-narrative engenders a sort of growing horror, though I confess I could make neither hide or hair of the club's guiding philosophy, indeed am not altogether clear if I was supposed to. Krzhizhanovsky is odd and brilliant and doesn't read like any other Russian writer of the age, let alone any of his occidental counterparts, and his hits make up for his misses. I think I would probably still recommend his collection of short stories, but this is worth a view.

The Gate by Soseki Nastume – About a Japanese clerk circa 1910 whose fortunes and mental health have been ruined by a scandalous marriage, living in a small house in Tokyo with his wife. On the one hand, Nastume's style is very deliberately subtle – there is little plot to speak of, the narrative being driven by the protagonist's apathy and inability to affect his circumstance. At the same time, stylistic peculiarities of the novel at the age, in particular the English novel of which Nastume was one of the earliest foreign imitators, insist on fairly elaborate descriptions of the mental state of the protagonist. Between the two I found that Nastume's personal aesthetic was sort of in conflict with the story he was trying to tell – I felt like I knew too much about the protagonist in some ways, was offered insight into his psyche that he himself did not possess. On the other hand the loving, intimate description of post Meiji-Restoration Japan is a delight, and Nastume has a talent for language. I enjoyed this and will keep an eye out for another.

Cassandra at the Wedding by Dorothy Baker – The story of a half-mad undergrad attempting to ruin the wedding of her identical twin sister. You can see why this is an acknowledge mid-century classic – Baker's writing is excellent, funny and clever while still remaining the chaacter's distinct voice. Indeed, I enjoyed the first two thirds of the novel so much that I found myself rather keenly disappointed by the ending which is, in the words of a woman who saw me reading it in a restaurant the other day, 'too tidy.' But still it's the sort of disappointment where you feel like the thing goes from being a masterpiece to just super, super good, that is to say, one that I can live with. Strong recommendation.

Oh, yeah, one last note – while I bow to no one in my esteem for the NYRB Classics folk, whoever wrote the back cover for this absolutely fucked a dog. Cassandra's homosexuality is a plot point which shouldn't be revealed in the summary. So, yeah, change that.

The Violent Century by Lavie Tidhar – Reading a book by a person you know is a lose/lose proposition. Either you like it, which is damaging to the ego and corrupting to any similar ideas you may have had, or you don't like it, and are forced to mouth lies to them at gatherings. I've known Lavie Tidhar for, I dunno, four or five years now, quite casually, we send each other mean twitter messages and meet for drinks on extremely infrequent occasions. I have a short story in his for-charity anthology Jews Vs. Zombies. I do a really severely good impression of him, it's just savage, ask me at a bar sometime.

Anyway, having never read anything else by the man I still get the sense this is one of his more commercial works, which is to say that it is resolutely noncommercial. The plot itself is relatively simple – a bit of John LeCarre, a pinch of Dashiell Hammet (anyone who has read this and my own Low Town trilogy, please take note that the 'Old Man''s appearance in both is an independent act of appropriation on each of our parts) but mostly just straight up WWII era Marvel Comics, Captain America knocking out Hitler, that sort of thing. But the style is, if not Finnegan's Wake, more dificult (seemingly) than most of what you will see in genre fiction – there are no quotation marks, for instance, and the story breaks with some frequency between descriptions of past events and characters commenting on these events in the present. I say seemingly because, in fact, the style is all cleverly slanted so as to provide the narrative a ferocious momentum, with expository information peppered in between the action. I really devoured this thing over the course of a short bus ride. The point being, I'm glad I didn't have any ideas for writing something about superheroes, because I'd probably have to chuck them. Good on you, Lavie.

A Confederate General From Big Sur – A totally entertaining comic novel, about a couple of Beat-era wastrels in Northern California. Or novella, really, it can't be fifty thousand words. Anyway, I quite enjoyed it, though I'm not sure there I would pretend there was a tremendous amount there. My first Brautigan, I've got two more to go through before I commit to any broader decisions on the man, I know you're all just mad with anticipation but you'll still have to wait.

Lies, First Person by Gail Hareven – A middle-aged Israeli woman becomes obsessed with taking vengeance on her uncle, who molested her sister years earlier as part of an effort to plumb the mind of Adolf Hitler. It's...extremely dark. Ms. Hareven is clearly very talented – the prose itself is uncomplicated, but the moral questions she raises – about guilt, and evil, and the possibility of redemption, are of the highest order. Raised, but never answered. The ending – THIS IS SORT OF SPOILERY, SORRY – seems to so nakedly praise the healing power of vengeance as to suggest that either our unreliable narrator is being unreliable, or the writer is making a broader ironic commentary. And while both of those notions seem possible I confess I struggled to discern strong evidence for either, or at least not significantly stronger than for a blunter reading of the text. Page to page it also drags about, particular during the long third portion during which the (anti-)heroine is talking herself into violence which I found rather tiring. That said, sometimes you can not like a book but still like the writer, if that makes sense, and I'll keep an eye out for something else by Ms. Hareven.

Books I Read October 18th, 2016

And another week down, never again to return. What profundities, what life lessons, what insights has the passing of these last seven days settled upon my soul? What scars can I display to you, gentle reader, which might prove of interest? Let me think. There must be...surely, there must be...all of those hours stacked atop one another, by God, just look at them, something of value should be squeezed out, even given the meager material, like coal weighted into diamond. Wait...wait...yes, there we are

Even the best mozzarella sticks in the world are, at the end of the day, still mozzarella sticks.

And now, on to books.

The Adventures of Sindbad by Gyula Krudy– To judge by my recent acquisitions, 'surreal works of fiction by 20th century central European authors' is starting to eclipse 'elevated genre fiction' as my reading brand of choice. Much of this is the influence of (here we are again) the New York Review of Books Classic's Editions (did I get the nomenclature right without checking? I've heard people just say NYRB Classics, which is objectively an aesthetic misstep, what with the the awkward 4/5 abbreviation), part of it is because a little bit of my heart remains, forever, in a curl of land running from the Curonian Spit down to Kotor. Forgive the exaggerated prose, this was not my first beer. Where were we? Yes, The Adventures of Sindbad. A curious, winding, lovely little book, consisting of the ruminations of the ghost of Sindbad (no relation) a cad and great lover in, roughly speaking, Duel Monarchy Hungary. Ruminations aren't exactly accurate, as his character is a ghost that pays pilgrimage to the sites and participants involved in his great acts of seduction, love making, and folly. A note of eerie nostalgia lies over the whole thing, as does a benign contempt for the lies and passions of men and woman. But at heart it is keenly life-affirming novel, despite the spectral protagonist, and Krudy displays a lovely style, sideways and funny, faintly but pleasingly erotic. Apparently it is widely considered a classic in its native Hungary, and good on the Hungarians. It fits in well with what I remember of them, a funny, caustic people, a peculiar little island of pony-riding steppes folk stuck slap-dash in the great surrounding circle of Slavs and Teutons. Oh, to see Budapest again, to lay beside the Seva in the green grass, to stare up at St. Stephens, to eat something liberally spiced. Did I mention I'm writing this in a bar? Yes? Very well, then.

Wake of Vultures – Full disclosure, Ms. Dawson (AKA Lila Bowen) and I are internet acquaintances, that is to say, she seems like a very nice person for whom I would one day like to stand to a beer, but who, alas, I have never actually met. Damn you, vagaries of space and time! On to the review.

Being, as you are, dear reader, a person of keen wisdom and deep insight you have no doubt already read Wake of Vultures, and are, I can only assume, right now curled up with a copy of the sequel, released last week, Conspiracy of Ravens, and good on you. Well, I suppose not right now, right now you are reading this blog, but presumably you have just finished it and are only glancing up now. In any event, I am not as clever as you are, and so my desire to read Conspiary of Ravens was stymied by my not yet having read its prequel, one that was remedied by a trip to The Strand. Now that we're all caught up.

The story of Nettie Lonesome, alias Rhett Butler, whose miserable life as horse breaker for her abusive not-parents is interrupted when she kills a vampire and becomes privy to a supernatural world which exists beneath the west in which she lives. From there, a great deal of adventure ensues as Lonesome (shades of the cattle outfit?) accepts her destiny as a hero and the peculiarities of her personhood (did I get that nomenclature right?) Given my affection for the genre, it will be small surprise that I devoured this tail of outsider derring do. Dawson (when I'm talking about her as a writer I talk about her without the honorific – take that!) does fabulous work in expanding the franchise for this sort of protagonist. It was distinct and fast-plotted and I would tell you to buy it if you did not, as we have previously established, already own a copy. But I know you you did already, so there would be no point. Instead I'll say you should buy a copy for a friend, and then give it to that friend. No, wait, buy the new one, first week sales are important. Wait, no, buy both. Yes, that's what I'm settling on. Buy this one, not the others. Turgenev doesn't need the sale, Jesus.

Virgin Soil by Ivan Turganev – That said, I really liked this. A story about revolutionaries in the Russian provinces circa 1880, I guess.There is, of course, an odd sort of formalism which is characteristic of this era of novel, in particular a tendency for the author to describe, basically without obfuscation, the intimate personality of their characters. I have previously lamented this quality in Austen, and though I think she is particularly brutal, it has to be said that it seems fairly ubiquitous – thinking on it now Hugo was pretty bad with that also, as was Zola. Or, maybe I'm wrong, I never really took an English lit class. In any event, it is striking that, while Turgenev certainly illuminates its characters to a degree which is generally not seen in modern novels, or at least not good modern novels, there still is room for surprising scenes of pathos – witness, for instance, the forced confession of Paklev (sp) by Simoygin (also sp), which is really fabulously well executed, and feels horrible and sad even though you know exactly what's going to happen. Finally, from being quite beautifully written – its descriptions of the Russian countryside inspire a visit – Turgenev, unlike some of his compatriot geniuses, has a light touch in his descriptions of human character and conduct, more an observer, it seemed to me, than a didact. It won't displace War and Peace for me any time soon, but then again, that's kind of a silly bar.

Dead Certainties: Unwarranted Speculations – In retrospect I'm surprised I'd never heard of this odd pseudo history, or historical criticism, or what have you, by renowned historian Simon Schama, having been a long time fan and also enjoying these sort of exercises. The peculiar narrative structure revolves around (I am simplifying the matter significantly) short pieces of fiction recounting 1) the death of Wolfe at the gates of Quebec, as well as the veneration which followed and 2) the murder of a relative of a renowned historian of the French and Indian War, and the trial which followed that relative's death. The meta-joke is that Schama, whose books Citizens, about the French Revolution, and The Embarrassment of Riches, a cultural history of the Dutch Golden age, are broadly regarded as masterpieces, is calling into question the reliability of any historical narrative as being dependent upon the perspective of the individuals involved. I confess that, with all the respect that I have towards the man, this does not strike me as an altogether devastatingly clever commentary, though it deserves being said that apparently it went over the head of many of its initial critics, who reviewed the works as non fiction though it is obviously not so. What this leaves is, basically, some very well written bits of historical fiction by one of the great historians of the age (am I overselling that? I'm not sure I feel qualified to say either way). I enjoyed it, though if you put a gun to my head and said, tell me what Simon Schama book I should read, I wouldn't say this one. Also, quit holding a gun to people, what the heck is wrong with you. Gosh.

Books I Read October 10th, 2016

Things mostly come down to the weather and the music they are playing in the bar you are in: cool but sunny and very clear, and Smashing Pumpkins, but the first more than cancels out the second. Still, I feel compelled to complain to the management. Speaking of, obliquely, did you know I had a book come out last week? A City Dreaming, is the title, and I would urge all of you, all of you yes, every one of you, the ones in the back as well, to sprint out to your nearest book store and purchase a copy.

War and the Illiad by Simone Weil, Rachel Bespaloff and Christopher E.G. Benfey – a collection of wide-ranging essays discussing the Illiad, ranging in quality from mostly excellent to good, save for the meta-take tacked on at the end, which was the sort of exhausting drivel which makes me grateful I never really did more than tuck my toe into the fetid waters of the academy. Kidding, slightly. The first essay in particular, by Weil; which argues that the genius of the Illiad lies in its naked observation that violence, its inflicting and its suffering, is the defining feature of human existence; was very good, if perhaps not altogether confirmed by the text. As a rule, I find anything which encourages me to think about the Illiad to be valuable, a foundational text endlessly capable of offering new insight into the whole human condition thing. I spent much of Monday wandering around thinking about Hubris and Eudaimonia and that one – what is that one, where for a brief moment you are the shining equal of the gods themselves, except not quite, not quite, and then you overstep your boundaries and the crushing horror of your own mortality becomes, usually quite literally, thrust again upon you? --anyway, thinking about that one. 'Sing, O Muse!' Ooooo, enough to give a fellow shivers.

Latro in the Mist by Gene Wolfe -- Frequent readers (Surely there must be some better use of your...that is to say, one might learn Spanish or perhaps do a puzzle...well, you're here already, might as well stay) will know that I have a complicated relationship with Gene Wolfe. For The Book of the New Sun, his marvelous short fiction, and the truly masterful Peace, I would argue that Wolfe is one of and probably the foremost living writer of speculative fiction, that is to say, fiction. And yet the rest of his work I confess to finding generally impenetrable, even viewed with the most positive possible spin. (I feel comfortable writing bad things about a beloved literary hero of mine because a) he will never, ever read this and b) Wolfe is of that class of writer who deserves to be discussed not simply with enthusiasm but with serious, studious contemplation, contemplation which may led to criticism.) Soldiers of the Mist and Soldiers of Arete are the story of the falsely-named Latro, who suffers a wound during the Persian Wars which renders him lose his memory each evening but which also allows him to see the ways in which the gods interact directly with humanity. He wanders about Greece and Asia Minor, trying to find a way to restore his memory and interacting with the heroes and gods of classical Greece. The clever conceit with Latro's memory allows Wolfe to indulge in a late period tic he developed, that of roughly ending a chapter and using the bulk of the next to explain, in his loose way, to the degree that Wolfe ever explains anything, what exactly happened in the preceding entry. In Book of The Long Sun this tendency drove me absolutely apeshit, but here it works much better, and Wolfe does (as he always does) some clever things with Latro's memory and observations. Wolfe is an intentionally frustrating writer, and when that works, it works to great effect. But often it comes off as over coy, his refusal to describe any character in useful detail, or shoving a critical but not particularly clever clue into a dull front half of a paragraph. Here also, in true Wolfe fashion, we have his predilection for long digressions about what are clearly specific interests of his, sword fighting or siege craft, that drag down the narrative and just generally seem unacceptable in a book which often refuses to provide basic information on far more relevant concerns. Finally and most critically, Wolfe's characters here seem terribly thin, really the faintest of possible sketches. One gets the sense that he is not really interested in them, nor for that matter in the prose itself, but only in the skeleton beneath it, in his own love of riddle.

But of course, it goes without saying that he has a genius for said riddles, a genius which few other writers, certainly no one who is considered a direct competitor, can honestly claim. When one of the more significant puzzles does work, and when you are clever enough to understand it, the sensation can be quite thrilling. Which is, I suppose, to say that this is another book which I did not like particularly but reconfirms (needlessly) my faith in Gene Wolfe's unique powers.

Going to the Dogs: The Story of a Moralist by Erich Kastner – Yeah, quite good. Sort of a Vile Bodies written by a rake living in Berlin in 1933, though Kastner's literary powers, while impressive, can't really be compared to Waugh. It is still very clever. The language quite crackles, and its sentiments are pulpy without veering quite into melodrama. If it is not quite brilliant, it was still enjoyable and cruel, and I'll pick up another Kastner at some point down the line.

Pitch Dark by Renata Adler – Oooo. Ooo! Wow! What fabulous, fabulous prose. Adler is a tremendously skilled stylist, I can't even say how much I enjoyed this. About a woman in early-middle (?) age reminiscing on a long time affair, and on a misadventure in Ireland, and about many, many other events that have happened to her. It is written in this peculiar, discursive style, with the first and third sections in particular consisting of memories and observations which have no real narrative link, but maintain a certain continuous theme of confusion, error, passion, nostalgia and occasionally a bit of hope. Adler is working without a net her, and to pull off this sort of novel requires the most enormous gifts – no slacking, like you get to do with a plot. Each paragraph and sentence has to be clever on its own merits, indeed, has to be more than usually clever because the reader is always secretly a little annoyed when they have to reset their thinking and grasp some new character, story, or idea. But succeed Adler does, and with high marks. I roared through it in about five hours interspersed with walking, laughing loudly at a coffee shop, on a park bench, and in a quiet bar. I'll be picking up something else by Ms. Adler shortly, and strongly recommend you check this one out.

Books I Read October 3rd, 2016

This last week the city turned the color of smoke, the sky and the cement a fabulous monochrome. Despite years of evidence there is some part of me which remains skeptical as to the changing of the seasons, thrills anew at each discovery of the passage of time; the changing leaves, the black-haired sons of Abraham surveying my heritage outside the public library (Shana Tova to the chosen people, as a side note). Did you know I have a book coming out tomorrow, or Thursday, depending upon where in the world you live? It is called A City Dreaming, and I am forced by the peculiarities of my trade to become an absolute boor about it for at least the next couple of weeks, my apologies. Perhaps consider purchasing it. On now to books I did not write...

The Engagement by Georges Simenon – Obviously, Simenon has an enormous reputation both in his native France and throughout the world (I read something somewhere that he was the best selling author of the 20th century. This cannot possibly be true, can it?) Prior to this I'd only read a few of his Maigret stories, about a taciturn giant who investigates crimes, and thought they were acceptable though not exceptional entries in the detective sub genre. The Engagement is very much not in that vein, being more comparable, I suppose, to that brand of noir which is, basically, about bad things happening to unsavory people, sort of a James M Cain or Jim Thompson (though stylistically they have nothing in common, Thompson is all fire and Simenon all ice.) The plot is simple: a weak, lonely loser is set up for murder by a woman with whom he is obsessed. The anti-hero himself is masterly drawn; a mincing, obese pervert who we none the less find preferable to the society who finds him so loathsome. As to the rest – the plot, the motivations of the other characters – these are opaque and less skillfully rendered. But Simenon's genius lies in offering a brutally unflinching portrait of humanity without falling into sanctimony or glibness, and this gives that to us in spades. The final scene, which I won't describe for fear of spoiling, well pays for the rest.

An Ermine in Czernopol by Gregor Von Rezzori – Interesting. About childhood in a a provincial capital in a post WWI Romanian, and also about the end of the patchwork, multi-ethnic fabric of the Hapsburg Empire which would be torn asunder during WWII. This is a sly, subtle, sidelong sort of work, digressions and side stories dominating the hint of plot. As a writer Rezzori is a pressure boxer, like Proust or Stephen King, relying for narrative effect on a cavalcade of observations and analogies, and I often felt that many of his lines examined individually did not hold closely together. But there is a way he has of using negative space, of slipping essential details sidelong, which I very much enjoyed, and his earthy, ironic humanism is a treat. I mean I liked it enough to pick up another one of his while I was out this week.

Les Enfants Terribles by Jean Cocteau – A phantasmic nightmare of a novella, about a brother and sister so obsessed with their imaginative games and theatrical poses that they destroy each other rather than reach adulthood. Haunting, disturbing, very strange. Give it a shot.

Butcher's Crossing By John Williams– This is about the myth of the unspoiled west, and of our desperate, all-consuming need to spoil it, of an innate fear of death which drives us to unsparingly destroy the environment around us. It is...haunting and disturbing. Between this and Stoner (I enjoyed but did not love Augustus, despite its acclaim) the critical re-evaluation of Williams seems well-deserved. His prose is excellent but unassuming, and the complexity of his thought reveals itself slowly. Recommended.

Seven Churches by Milos Urban – Cool! Weird! About a bloodless, socially uncomfortable loser and failed police officer who gets embroiled in a series of murders which have something to do with the Gothic churches of the Prague New Town. Excellently combining the usual bloody horrors to be found in this sort of horror novel with a grander, existential loathing of the modern age, a compelling repudiation of contemporary western civilization which will leave you empathizing with...well, I won't spoil it. But it's real solid, and the writing is quite strong, especially for this sort of thing. Definitely pick it up if you get the chance.

Books I Read September 29, 2016

The temperature has finally started to drop. Pumpkin beer has been around for about 6 weeks but only a few days ago did it become appropriate to drink it. October will be a rough month, and I luxuriate in the interim, taking long walks to Bay Ridge and the Far Rockaways, swallowing the last of the summer sun

The Fortunes of Africa by Martin Meredith– I am that peculiar sort of person for whom a single-volume, political/military history of some fair swathe of the planet is about the most enjoyable form of literature. I LOVE these sorts of things, I could eat them up like candy. This is a very good example of the form, detailing African history from Ancient Egypt to the modern-age, with a primary focus on the exploitation of its resources, which essentially ends up being the interplay between 'foreign' and native African forces. At eight or nine hundred pages it is, of course, much too short for so vast a topic but still choc full of insight to any non-expert. The writing is skillful if not particularly memorable, but then again only a very small number of historians are capable of writing truly captivating prose in its own right (Barbara Tuchman and Simon Schama come to mind). All the same, Meredith excels in clearly ordering vast quantities of information into a coherent narrative, the most difficult and essential task in a book of this sort. Depressing, of course, as histories generally are, but you can hardly blame that on the author. Strong recommendation, if you share my affection for this sort of thing.

The Year 200 by Agustin de Rojas– Right. So, apparently de Rojas was sort of the grand old man of Cuban science-fiction, and this is regarded as his finest work – though I confess a quick Google search found scant information in English that was not put out by the publisher, so maybe this exaggerates his position, I have no idea. If any Cubans or Spanish speakers generally want to help clear up my ignorance in the comments, that would be much appreciated. In any event, this was more interesting than it was good. It reads a lot like a 60's American sci-fi novel, which if you have been following along you will know is not a swathe of the sub-genre for which I have much affection. On its own merits, as a future thriller about a swathe of (basically) evil Americans having their consciousness re-awoken several hundred years after the total victory of the communist world, it is at best modestly effective. Rojas has a predilection for large-scale info dumps, some of which never seem to become directly relevant, and there's a lot of deus ex machina style reveals, with sudden plot shifts that fall flat because they've never been signaled earlier in the narrative. As a work of, if you will, intellectual sci-fi, it is didactic and not altogether clever, that is to say I saw little useful echo of our own world in the future society Rojas has created. The characters themselves, as inevitably in these sorts of books, are utterly one dimensional, impossible to sympathize with. There are a few interesting bits here and there, but I confess to coming away disappointed. Avoid.

Love in a Foreign City by Eileen Chang – Hell, was this good. Chang was a wealthy socialite in Shanghai and Hong Kong, and these series of long short stories about the years before and during the Japanese Occupation, of a China developing rapidly in uncertain times, are fabulous. Chang has a subtle touch and an appreciation for the complexities of human motivation comparable to any of the great English masters of the period, and her insight into an upper crust of coastal, Chinese elite, is truly fascinating. Imagine Somerset Maugham if he had been going to cocktail parties overlooking Kowloon Bay and you'd have something of the flavor. Strong recommendation.

Dancing Aztecs by Donald Westlake – Ha! Ha! Boy, I liked this. I think the only other thing I read by Westlake was the Parker thing, which I admit left me a little flat, but this is far better, a blisteringly paced comedy about a cast of dozens chasing a MacGuffin. Actually the plot is fabulously detailed and deftly complex, but really what you're in it for is Westlake's insulting but affectionate take on New York City and its inhabitants, as well as an enormously enjoyable use of language. One feels a certain degree of compulsion, however, to admit that some of the politics of 1976 are not those of the current age, and although Westlake is reasonably even-handed in his abuse of New York's various social milieus, one would have to admit that (as in most things) the darker races get the worst of it. That said he had some Jew jokes in there that cracked me up, so who knows.

Books I Read, September 19 2016

Here in the city the light is fainter and jackets have again become fashionable. The summer seemed like it would go on forever but has not done so. I read the following books while the trees lost their monochrome, on soon-to-be-shuttered patios..

Little Lumpen Novelita by Roberto Bolano – I keep thinking I've read all of Bolano's fiction and then I keep finding little bits I haven't – I hope this trend continues on indefinitely. The recollections of a would be gun moll, though of course Bolano's plots cannot really be reduced to thumbnails, this is one of the best of Bolano's 'lesser' works, here indicating length and not quality, for in fact I think his strengths might be, first and foremost, in the novella and the novelette. In any case, he is is in top form here; his writing is at once brilliant and insightful without ever breaking out of the character's voice. It feels absolutely natural but also terribly, terribly clever, which should be impossible but somehow isn't. Sexy, scary, always vital, a minor masterpiece which once again confirms Bolano's status as one of the greatest writers of the modern age.

The General in His Labryinth by Gabriel Garcia Marquez – A novelized history of the last days of Simon Bolivar, the Liberator, who freed the entirety of Spanish South America only to see his dreams of a single nation running from the Carribean to Patagonia dashed by his own intransigence and the parochialism of his fellow citizens. Really, you should just know who Simon Bolivar is, I shouldn't need to give you a description. Anyway, it's not bad. Marquez is working in muted colors here (no magic, sorry) and he seems to have largely made up most of the details of Bolivar's exile from Bogota to Santa Cruz, but Bolivar feels richly believable as a great man in the last act of his tragedy.

Motherless Brooklyn By Johnathan Lethem – Look, we all have prejudices, OK? If you think you don't it's because yours are so firmly ingrained that you've ceased to be able to recognize them. Some people hate the Jews, some people hate the gays, some people hate the Inuit. I, personally, have an irrational dislike of hipster fiction. It's foolish, it's straight bigotry, but there it is. I never made an attempt at Infinite Jest, I crinkle up my nose when I hear Franzen's name mentioned, I don't know Dave Eggers from Adam. Lethem has long been on said list, but this was cheap and there was a quote on the front comparing it to Chandler and I figured, what the hell. The story of an orphaned mook from Central Brooklyn with tourette's syndrome, and his attempts to get retribution for the murder of the man who raised/corrupted him. It's totally serviceable elevated noir, the writing is not bad, the hero's illness is portrayed authentically, there is enough action to keep an audience entertained without tipping over into outright absurdity. Crime is, of course, the most absurd of all of the genres, torn as it is between demanding an extreme sharpness of prose (Chekhov's gun is never more in evidence) while also finding some way to mislead an attentive reader as to the culprit. In the hard-boiled American tradition (Chandler, Hammet, etc) the pacing and the excellent prose are meant to distract the reader from any inconsistencies of plot. More modern noir often utilize an unreliable or, in particular, an incompetent narrator, and to describe the mystery itself in such terms that the reader can't jump ahead of the hero. This sometimes gets a little kitschy (Our hero is blind! Our hero is autistic! Our hero drinks lead paint!) but it works well enough here. I'm not, frankly, altogether clear why this has quite so much critical reverence, being enjoyable but to my mind not altogether more than that. Still, I'll keep my eye out for another Lethem next time I'm hanging around the Strand.

Kingdom Come By J.G. Ballard – Sort of a less horrifying High Rise, Ballard's last novel is about a shopping center in the exurbs of London, and also about the horrifying meaningless of modern consumer driven society. Of course, being a Ballard it is beautifully written at parts, but the plot never quite hangs together and it's too similar to his earlier stuff not to invite unfavorable comparison, and I couldn't help but find a lot of the middle-England bashing to be kind of nasty in spirit. Not his best, but not terrible either.

The Hot Kid By Elmore Leonard – The entire time I spent reading this novel (admittedly, only like 4 or 5 hours) I was trying to figure out if I had read it before, but never exactly coming to a conclusion. In and of itself this actually isn't the most terrible thing you could say about a book – Ross McDonald's Lew Archer stuff are one big morass of genius in my mind – but Leonard is, bluntly, not Ross McDonald. The story of a US Marshall in the twenties who's really, really good at shooting people, and of all the people he shoots, it's readable as hell and there are some funny lines, but basically the plot is lazy and doesn't make much sense and the character's are lamentably unformed. Is Leonard actually very good? I sort of don't have the heart to go back and reread him and find out.

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley – It's really weird that it took me this long to get to this, but here we are. It's probably difficult for a modern reader to appreciate how original and wacky this book must have been when written – it holds such a place in the popular consciousness as to render banal what was once utterly unique. The mad scientist, the creature itself, these things have passed into cliché but of course they've done so because Shelley invented them. Some parts of it, namely the sort of grand guignol elements with the creature hunting down Frankenstein's friends, don't hold up as well. But the sheer imaginative genius of the thing remains potent, as well as the withering critique of human society. The centerpiece of the book, with the creature describing his time spent observing humanity, remains potent, as does Shelley's refusal to depict either creator or child with much affection.

The Graces by Laure Eve – (Full disclosure, Laure is a friend, in so far as we get a drink on those rare occasions when we're in the same city, and tweet mean things at each other. This was why I bought the book, but it isn't why I'm reviewing it, if I didn't like it I'd just wouldn't have said anything.)

The story of a new girl moving to a new town and becoming embroiled in the lives of a crew of beautiful, fabulous strangers is one familiar to me as even an infrequent reader of young adult fiction, but in the Graces Ms. Eve cleverly the Mary Sure archetype in a variety of clever ways the enumeration of which would constitute a spoiler. Suffice to say that it is the sort of book that functions simultaneously as an excellent example of a particular sub genre and of a meta-critique of that genre. It's fun, its surprising, pick it up.

By Mark Helprin – Ugh. Reading was like eating an entire meal made our of marzipan, and a very large meal at that. Helprin's heroic paen to the greatest generation, about a love affair between a returning serviceman and a rich socialite, and the evil men who seek to destroy them, this is 700 pages of treacle. In his immensely superior Winter's Tale (my affection for which is the reason I picked this up) Helprin's moralizing tendencies are rendered more forgivable by the fairy tale like nature of the narrative, but without that crutch to lean on it becomes tedious in the extreme. This is the sort of book in which characters are constantly agreeing with one another, in which one hero (they are mostly heroes) will give a speech and a second hero will say, “yes, I agree” and then the first hero will talk a lot more. For a man so obsessed with his racial identity Helprin seems never to have actually met a Jew, and the wit and irony for which we are justly famed are nowhere to be found in his paladin protagonist, the most tiring, didactic, exhausting moralizing hero to be found outside of a golden age comic book. Helprin has talent, obviously, and there are plenty of excellent lines to be found, excellent lines which are, sadly but inevitably, surrounded by half a dozen other, less excellent lines, saying exactly the same thing. Helprin likes good things and dislikes bad things. He likes his men heroic and his woman heroic but in a more feminine matter. He dislikes racism and rape. Who could quibble with a moral view so starkly black and white? Who, likewise, gains any benefit from a morality expressed in such juvenile terms? Avoid.

The Other by Thomas Tryon – That I figured out the twist more or less immediately did not remove the stark thrills of this novel, about an innocent thirteen year old and his sociopathic twin. Fun, creepy, generally well written, NYRB classics edition killing it as ever.

Wise Blood by Flannery O'Connor – Again, really, really weird that I haven't read this yet. O'Connor is justly revered for her prose, which is at once simple enough for a an adolescent to grasp (there is a reason we teach A Good Man Is Hard to Find in high school) and evocative and strange enough to leave one in modest awe. There is something very Slavic about O'Connor, a thick vein of Dostoevsky in her holy fools and desperate atheists. This was funny and disturbing and humanistic in its deepest sense. It reaffirms one's sense of the justice of human existence (a dubious premise, but still) to discover that a revered literary genius is deserving of such acclaim.

Fatale by Jean-Patrick Manchette – Ha! Ha! Sort of a crueler Red Harvest, about a woman who makes her living going from town to town and discovering a prominent citizen willing to pay her to kill another prominent citizen. Bloody, funny, richly and joyously amoral, a bright and thrilling read.

Mehmed, My Hawk by Yasar Kemal – Basically a Turkish adventure novel, about a Robin Hood sort of character who's mistreatment at the hands of an evil land owner leads him to become a mountain brigand, struggling with his desire for vengeance and his moral concerns. Kemal seems revered both in his native land and abroad, but I confess that apart from an authentic feeling of experience (Kemal grew up in the area the novel takes place in, and supposedly all of his uncles were bandits) there really isn't a ton here that impressed me. Can someone help me out? Is there something better of his that I should be reading?

The Outward Room by Millen Brand– Small and lovely. At the height of the great depression, a woman escapes from an insane asylum and makes a life with a laborer in the city, their quiet love proving to be more recuperative than Freudian therapy. Writing it out like that, this seems like really bad advice, but it works in the context of the story. Uplifting without being cloying, worth your time.

Books I Read 9/12/2016

I read so much good shit the last few weeks, it's been awesome. Books! Books are so great! Books are one of like three things that if, for some inexplicable reason, I was no longer able to enjoy, I'd probably think about jumping off one of the bridges in New York that have low railings (Hi GW!). Take that as an overwrought expression of my love of literature, as intended. We're tailing through the end of Summer here, we had a couple of miserable days but all in all it's not so bad, it could be worse, we're standing above the ground, ain't we? You are reading, this, are you not? Q.E.D. Let's get on with it, then.

An Armenian Sketchbook By Vasily Grossman – Yeah, really lovely. The collected memories of Vasily Grossman, one of Soviet Russia's finest writers, during a trip he took in Armenia towards the end of his life. Grossman is most famous as, essentially, a chronicler of human misery – as a war correspondent he saw the terrible sieges on the Eastern front as well as liberating Treblinka with the Red Army, and speaking out against the Soviet regime meant that most of his writing could not be published in his lifetime – but An Armenian Sketchbook is an earthy, life-affirming read, if one that carries clearly in it the knowledge of the terrible misery possible in human existence. Though visiting Armenia as an interpreter of a beloved Armenian epic, he did not speak the language, and his experiences are that of a foreigner in a country which takes hospitality as being of enormous importance. Sketchbook is once a loving description of how food and drink, beauty, art generally, are capable of checking the horrors of life, both existential and political, and Grossman's affection for the Armenians becomes a thundering approbation for the human species, in its diverse and multifaceted glory.

Ride a Cockhorse by Raymond Kennedy – Revelatory. The description of how a post-menopausal bank clerk, through amorality and sheer personal brutality, swiftly amasses an empire, Ride a Cockhorse is at once a hysterical and an intensely disturbing vision of the rise of fascism. I am burying my political convictions deep in the second paragraph of a blog which no one reads when I say that the personal style of the antihero, which consists of gross dishonesty expressed in a contemptuous and exaggerated masculinity, is one which presages that of one of our own current presidential candidates, though you're welcome to guess which one on your own. In any event, very much worth reading.

Ghost Story by Peter Straub – Fabulous! One of the best horror novels I've ever read, maybe the, although I'll need to wait a few weeks for the afterglow fades before I can give a confident answer. In any event, very, good, like a subtler, better written It (King and Straub collaborated on the Talisman and on a faintly remembered, far weaker sequel the immediate name of which escapes me). In broad strokes, it resembles King's classic an ancient evil preying upon a small town, a group of ordinary-ish individuals forced to confront it; but I have to say I think this is stronger than anything similar I can remember reading in King's ouvre. Straub's characters are richer and his horror subtler (though I didn't feel less effective), a stiletto, rather than a cudgel. Also, the opening is just one of the most effective things you'll ever see in terms of immediately unsettling the reader. I basically dare you to open it and read half a page and then put it down. I double dare you.

Tough, interestingly, it suffers from the essential problem which exists in writing horror novels, one which I'm going to reveal in a couple of jumps since it sort of spoils the ending

(SPOILER ALERT SPOILER ALERT SPOILER ALERT)

OK, so a horror story requires, as part of an honest completion of its ritual, a bad end for the main characters. Note that this is not necessarily to say that the main characters need to die, but they cannot triumph. This is critical; as a reader we have to get to the end and go, 'boy, wouldn't want to trade places with this guy.' But, interestingly, readers will generally not accept a mostly bad ending in a novel, especially not a genre novel – they feel annoyed to have spent 500 pages with a group of characters only to have them dismembered or whatever. Most writers essentially try to split the baby, knocking off a couple of ancillary characters but the heroes managing to survive or at least to defeat the main evil, which works to a degree but not as well as coming to the final sentence and then ripping the carpet out from a reader's surrogate. Still, gave me a pretty good nightmare last week while I was sleeping in an abandoned house. But that's another story.

The Hugenots Geoffrey Treasure – well researched, decently written, essentially not that riveting by my lights. It gives you a pretty good overview of the history of French Calvinism, from the man himself to the edict of Revocation. If this is a really specific interest of yours than have at it but in retrospect I'm not exactly sure why I decided to pick it up. I do like the Wars of Religion as a time period, I mean, not like it like I want to be in the wake of an invading Swedish army but like it like it's fun to read things about it. Also, I think I thought it would be shorter than it was.

The Interview by Herta Muller – Looking at my library I appear to be a real glutton for experimental writing about communist totalitarianism; in the Romanian sub-category alone a few months ago I read Manea's A Black Envelope. This is, by the standards of the strange sub-genre, fairly readable, the nightmares and past history of a woman in Bucharest going to one of an endless seeming but potentially fatal interview with a communist apparatchek. It was really quite good, as you'd expect from a Nobel prize winner, or not really because that's an absolutely asinine award. The prize for literature and the prize for peace make rather embarrassing reading for the committee, as a quick side note, but we're getting off topic. The Interview is swiftly paced and well-written and definitely worth your time.

The Glory of the Empire: A Novel, A History By Jean d'Ormesson – A history of the Holy Asian Empire, which never stretched from Iberia to Korea, indeed which never existed at all, save in the mind of the author and his readers. Meticulously if falsely documented, d'Ormesson mostly does a fine job of mimicking the tics and style of Gibbons' and his various followers, albeit it for an entirely fictional place. Honestly, I found I wanted to enjoy this more than I did – the idea of history as myth, the peculiar attempt to stuff a false nation into the actual historical record, all of this is appealing, but the actual plot is just not that interesting. Much of it, to me at least, read like a not altogether enjoyable fantasy novel, with heroes and priests winging in and out of the narrative. More clever in theory than practice.

The Hot Spot Charles Williams – Call it Jim Thompson light, about a used car salesman who gets an idea to rob a bank, and the ineveitable trouble that arises. Not as brutal or as brilliant as the master, but essentially the same milieu, foolish people doing bad things to their own certain injury. A fine way to while away a few hours, but I didn't feel it much more than that.

The Ecstatic by Victor LaValle – Ha! Ha! Very odd, very funny. Like a modern John Fante, though LaValle's protagonist is more narcissistic than insane, while LeValle's antihero, is skirting (?) clear madness throughout. The writing crackles, and almost every page gave me a chuckle, even as the horror-laced imagery disturbs. Recommend.

City of Saints and Madmen By Jeff VanderMeer – Four shorts which are loosely connected as being about, in some way, the fantastical city of Ambergris, sort of a 1920's New York built atop a Lovecraftian abyss, although this is to exaggerate the degree to which the stoplacery ever really becomes clear. Each story is sufficiently different as to make a general review sort of useless – two have a normal-ish narrative structure, one purports to be a historical pamphlet regarding the early years of the city's existence. I applaud anyone who attempts to do anything innovative in the fantasy genre, stale as it tends to get, and while none of these stories blew my brains out of the back of my skull they were weird and sometimes scary and generally enjoyable. I'll keep my eye out for something else by VanderMeer next time I'm wondering through the Strand.

The Thief By Fuminori Nakamura – Is there a difference, really, between existential noir and other noir? Isn't all good noir existential? This excellent tale of a Tokyo-based pick pocket, so detached from his own humanity as to be virtually nameless, is very much in the Le Samourai sort of vein, an individual defined entirely by his profession. It's spare if a bit predictable, and more (to my mind) an enjoyable genre thriller than a particularly brilliant work of literature. That said, I enjoyed it and would pick up something else by this guy.

Nightmare Alley By William Lindsay Gresham – Ooooh. Ooooooh! Our tale of horror begins with the protagonist, a slick-talking, amoral stage magician watching a side show geek bite the head off a chicken, and swearing he would never fall so low. You can probably guess how it ends. In the middle is a narrative which makes the Hot Spot seem absolutely light-hearted by comparison, one in which faith of all kinds – in stage magic, in clairvoyance, in Christianity, and, most fascinatingly, in the practice of therapeutic psychiatry – is ridiculed mercilessly, and the world is reduced to a zero-sum game of staggering brutality. Legitimately disturbing, but worth your time.

Books I Read 8/30/2016

Books and books and books and books. Anyway, here are some.

Neuromancer by William Gibson – I was born in 1984, the same year that Neuromancer dropped, and so for me the future was always going to take place in some Asian-influenced megacity (sidenote: it's a funny 80's holdover that it was supposed to be Japan, with a rapidly declining population of 180 odd million people, and not the billion+ strong PRC), with street samurai roaming the back alleys, corrupt super corporations strangling the planet, wacky computer stuff, and lots of black leather. Sometimes there were even Elves, if memory serves. But still, one can imagine how new and fresh this must have felt upon arrival, coming as it did when most people didn't even own a computer and the internet was still something contained inside of Al Gore's mind. And it mostly holds up, with a rapid-fire pace and a hip sensibility that, unlike pretty much all of it's successors, isn't trying to hard. Of course, the ending doesn't make any sense, but with so much clever stuff in here – the downloaded consciousness of the protagonist's dead mentor, the Rasta space pilots – it seems almost churlish to mention it. Unfortunate that, like Tolkien, it spawned such endless varieties of absolute shit, but you can't hardly hold Gibson responsible for it. All in all a ton of of fun.

Deus Irae by Philip K. Dick and Roger Zelazny – I remember really loving Zelazny when I was a kid, the Amber books are a ton of fun, and what was the one about the demon killing gods, or something? That was cool too. Dick, frankly, I keep reading feeling like I should like, and then finding myself annoyed when I actually stop to look at him. So we'll say this one split the difference – there are some clever throw aways here, in this story about a post-apocalyptic religious cult which is based upon the worship of violence (or something like that: despite a lot of rather sophomoric moralizing, basic tenants of the faith never become clear). But there's a lot more that fails – the plot itself just doesn't hold up at all, the characterization is the sort of thing where you know the authors themselves weren't really all that interested in them, except as interlocutors for some, again, not all that clever discussions about faith, religion, and Christianity. One had the sense that this grew out of a couple of bowls in some late 60's fantasy convention, and bluntly put it would have probably been better if it stayed there.

Farewell Song Rabindranath Tagore – A sweet little tale of romance and the idea of romance. Slight but lovely, and well worth it for this line, which had me howling in bitter agreement on a plane to Toronto – 'all my books attain moksha in single editions, liberated from the cycle of rebirth, never to appear again.

The Drought by J.G. Ballard – Yeah, I mean, basically I have the same review of this as I have of Ballard's other books about the apocalypse being brought about by some human engineered environmental catastrophe, and the mental collapse of the people trying to survive it. The Drought, the general plot of which you can probably put together yourself, is disturbingly prophetic, well-written, and did not work for me quite as well as the other Ballard stuff I've been reading, although that's probably not because it's a step down in quality so much as they're all a bit similar. Still, well-worth a read, if just for the whole wacky water-harvesting sequence, which was dope as all hell.

Fear: A Novel of World War I by Gabriel Chevallier – So, so good. I've read a lot of the English WWI autobiographies (although this is technically a fiction, it's obviously informed by Chevallier's own experience in the trenches), Goodbye to All That, etc., and I have to say this blows it out of the water. As the title indicates, Chevallier seeks to strip bare the pointless horror of mechanized warfare, and to redefine the doughy infantrymen as one who, with the rarest exceptions, is defined largely if not exclusively by a desperate, all consuming, immediate physical terror. If you've ever wondered about what you would look like if you were forced to grab a rifle and hold a trench at the Somme, pick this one up and feel bad about yourself. Strongly recommended.

The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster – So, all in all I liked this. It's readable and melancholic and the notion that the third book in the series if meant to serve as sort of an ur-text for the first two is quite clever. It's my first of Auster's and later this week I went out and bought two more, which, concretely, is as good a recommendation as you could kind of ask for. Admittedly, it manages to do in 350 pages what Borges does better in about 9, but fine, we can't all be Borges, and mostly I enjoyed myself while I was occupied with it. All the same, I'm going to spend a few hundred words trashing it, or, more accurately, trashing the literary establishment which loves it so much.

So, this might reasonably be described as a sort of anti-mystery novel. It takes the tropes of the genre, with which Auster is clearly familiar, and subverts them. There are private detectives and people pretending to be private detectives, there are investigations and there are even (sort of) femme fatales. The set up is familiar enough, but the pay off goes loopy, with each of the first two stories (the third is a bit more complicated) basically mocking the idea that mysteries can be solved, that there is such a thing as identity, etc.

Well and good—but it leaves one wondering, why is this considered superior to the classic formula? Even the biggest Auster fan could not, in good consciousness, pretend that this is a work of profound human insight. If pressed, one would say that it was about identity, and obsession, and the way in which our creations usurp us, and the unknowable quality of existence, but, I mean, honestly, so what? This is not the sort of book which enlightens some corner of our shared experience, which redefines our self-conception—it is essentially a form of entertainment, not, in the last gasp, much different from Hammet or Chandler. Why, then, is Auster considered a genius and the aforementioned writers talented hacks? Is not providing a pay-off evidence of brilliance? Let me tell you something, friends, as a writer, endings are hard as shit. Making things wrap up in a coherent or even semi-coherent way, that's a lot of work. Far easier to just kind of trail off at the end there, a few notes about walking down a dark alley and never returning, and who are you to say to that you aren't the person you're chasing, and blah blah. Honestly I'm less taking aim at Auster here, cause I actually liked this, then I am someone like, for instance, Murakami, who has essentially made a career writing mediocre pulp which gets elevated to high literature because it doesn't have an ending.

The 47 Ronin Story by John Allyn – I picked this up because it was by the same publisher as the really, really, really excellent The Ronin, which I can't highly enough recommend, but it was terrible and not worth reading. It's not well written and it's not interesting and these two sentences were more time than it probably warrants.

Timbuktu by Paul Auster – Uhhhh...not good. Kind of a pretentious Marley and Me. I mean I didn't actually read Marley and Me but that's the sense I get of the thing. It's about a dog in search of an owner. I kept waiting for it to get way more clever but it never actually did. Avoid.

Paris Stories by Mavis Gallant – this is someone's favorite book, I'm sure, but it wasn't mine. Ms. Gallant is a talented writer of prose but, except for a few exceptions (the late returner and the couple of ones about the aging French novelist, the titles of which I find I can't be bothered to go back and look up) I was left cold at her work. They're skilled but bloodless, and I kept getting to the end of each and being glad I was done and faintly annoyed with the effort it took to get there.

The Bayou Trilogy by Daniel Woodrell – very, very peculiar, and not altogether excellent, though interesting just to see Woodrell's development. These three very early books detail (sort of) the life of Rene Shade, a Cajun police detective in a corrupt, slightly fantastical version of Baton Rouge. The first of the three is a straight police thriller, competent but utterly rote. Rene is a two-fisted, hard-drinking investigator who straddles the line between cop and crook, trying to do the right thing in a world which so manifestly does not reward the righteous. All of the usual cliches are here, and the writing is a long way from the excellence Woodrell shows in the vastly superior Winter's Bone. The second in the trilogy is a step up from the first, has some well-written scenes of violence and a meaner, tighter ending, but is likewise essentially unmemorable. Shade himself is just not interesting; we've seen him too many times in too many other stories, it's a struggle to give a shit about what happens to him.

Which, perhaps Woodrell knew, which is why he is, unexpectedly and inexplicably, relegating to a minor participant in the third book, replaced by his previously mentioned but never seen father, John X. Shade, a pool-player and general scum bag, who is forced to return to the bosom of his family while escaping a sociopath whose money he sort of stole. Gone are the conventional mysteries of the first two books in the trilogy, and the various hooks which are raised—the corrupt mayor, a crime boss against whom Rene had sworn vengeance, etc. – are never answered. It's a very peculiar narrative decision, frankly, and one which comes completely out of left field. One wonders how Woodrell's editors felt about him handing in a book which only very tangentially relates to the other two. In any event, it is objectively much better than the first two; weirder, better written, more in the 'southern Gothic' style than the classic detective mode. A one-off episode in which the pursuing sociopath gets entangled with a pair of milk-fed cornhuskers with less than savory motivations is particularly fun. Still, it's got a lot of flaws. Too much is happening too quickly, and while I didn't care particularly for the first two books it was still annoying not to have some sort of resolution for the narrative questions which were raised. Probably only interesting to a Woodrell completist, and even then barely.

The Book of Illusions By Paul Auster – This sucked. Sucked sucked sucked sucked sucked. Utterly mediocre. Shoddily written, never pretty and often not even competent (a rough third of the book consists of the narrator describing movies which don't exist). The characters are paper thin, their motivations largely nonsensical. Its got Auster's usual obsessions about identity, and writing as a form of creation, and blah blah blah, but it doesn't lead into anything meaningful. This was my third Auster book, as mentioned, and I feel confident it's going to be my last. One more exhibit that the modern critical establishment just doesn't have a goddamn idea what they're doing.

Books I Read 8/13/2016

Right, the last few weeks. Summer in the city, well, it's balls, it's just balls, man, it's balls all around. New York is (to the best of my knowledge) the only city in the world that does not require, which indeed demands it's citizens eschew the use of trash cans, and between the rotting fetid filth spilling out of punctured glad bags, the swamp-sweat of B.O., the gas fumes, etc., everyone who can flees to beaches or mountains or what have you. I followed suit for a bit, which is why this entry is heavy on genre stuff, because really, who wants to read anything dense while listening to the ocean lap against the waves. Although I did in fact end up reading a few, cause I'm such a glutton for punishment. In any event, on to the show...

Parade's End by Ford Madox Ford – A tetralogy detailing the end of the British Empire through the life of one Christopher Tietjens of Groby, the Englishest Englishman who ever ate a crumpet or watched a cricket match or had passionless sex with his forebearing wife. It straddles a curious spot in English literature, somewhere between the romances of the pre-war era and the more complex novels which would become prevalent later on. Chronicling the years just before to just after the Great War, long-suffering Tietjens attempts to survive the machinations of his faithless, lustful, brilliant wife Sylvia, his obsession with the forward-thinking, suffragette Valentine, and life in the trenches, which was a pretty nasty business so far as I can gather. It's interest in the upper classes, as well as the rather tiring conceit whereby Tietjens is endlessly in the wrong place at the wrong time and refuses, out of sheer Torie pique, to ever explain or defend itself, owes more to the generation of novels proceeding it. The structure is the more interesting part of the work, with each book in the series taking place over the span of several hours or at most days, as the protagonist (mostly Tietjens, though other characters take over narrative duties on occasion) thinks their way through the events of the moment as well as their ore recent history. It's very clever, if not quite so clever as some of the more adventurous writers who Ford would be instrumental in bringing into the public consciousness as the century wore on. Still, if you've got a thousand pages to read you could do a lot worse.

High Minds by Simon Heffer – Writing a cultural or intellectual history is a difficult task to set yourself; lacking concrete action or often, even, a clear chronology of events, the best manage to weave a narrative of an age through the ideas and creations of its artistic and intellectual champions. Alas, despite the enormous praise lavished on it, to my thinking High Minds, Simon Heffer's attempt to identify how the barbarians of the 1830's became the proto-moderns of the 1880's, does not meet the bar. Rather than express a coherent tableau, Heffer essentially ends up writing many dozens of small biographies about the prominent thinkers of the early and mid Victorian-age – Carlyle, Mill, Disraeli, etc., some of which are interesting, some of which aren't, none of which end up being more than puzzle pieces which never quite come together into a single picture. Some of the chapters – about the building of the Prince Albert Hall, and the World's Fair in particular – are so tedious and unrelated to the greater plot that it seems unbelievable that no editor swooped in to cut them. Like any large work of non-fiction, reading it will learn you things you didn't know, so it wasn't entirely a waste of my time, but still I can't imagine recommending to anyone, or at least to anyone I liked.

Little, Big by John Crowley – this one, by contrast, I've found myself recommending to basically everyone who will listen to me—to strangers at bars and social media acquaintances and every friend who has ever read anything. And now I'm going to recommend it to you as well, though with the caveat that it's the sort of book that cannot be neatly explained. It's about fairies, and also about everything important in human existence. It's beautifully written, its evocative and strange, it is, without any question, one of the very finest fantasy novels of the 20th century. Really, that's not enough praise to heap on it—it compares favorably, in my mind, not only to say, Neil Gaiman, but to Gabriel Garcia Marquez as well. Indeed, the fact that it is not even more highly praised can only be held as one more failure of the American critical establishment to give proper respect to the literary creations of its own countrymen. The perfect summer read, one that I have no doubt I will return to again and again as the years go by, a more than minor masterpiece, strongly, strongly, strongly recommend.

Drowned World by J.G. Ballard – Ballard has a way of elevating what would be an interesting but not brilliant genre trope into high literature by focusing on the psychological journey of the protagonists more even than the actual events of his narratives. In this case, the story of a handful of scientists in the wreckage of a water-logged London, a generation after the ice caps have swamped human civilization (madness! Who could ever suppose such a thing would ever happen!) is enriched by a progressive (regressive?) atavism which takes place in the minds of its main characters. Fun, quick, weird, depressing.

The House of the Spirits by Isabelle Allende – Here, dear reader, you will find every cliché of Latin American magical realism; virile, violent men; sultry, mystical woman; precocious children; fantastical happenings described in a banal fashion, giant animals, war and lust and violence. What you will not find, anywhere, is a recognizable human character, or indeed a story which feels authentic or honest in any way. This is, in short, a simpering mediocrity of a novel, and its critical popularity is inexplicable (or, more accurately, entirely and sadly explicable). The prose is fine, you won't be writing down any passages to look at but nor does it embarrass itself; indeed, if you hadn't read Marquez or Cortazar or any of the previous generation of writers who Allende is so clearly cribbing from, you might almost (almost) think this was a work of talent if not genius. But seen in context, it's impossible not to see her as a sad epigone of other, better writers. Pick up 100 Years of Solitude, or better yet, Savage Detectives.

You'll Enjoy It When You Get There: The Selected Stories of Elizabeth Taylor by Elizabeth Taylor – Why, oh why, has Ms. Taylor's work been so comprehensively forgotten? Is it solely her unfortunate choice of nom de plume? Maybe. 450 pages of short story, and every one of them good to excellent. Admittedly, her range is rather limited, dealing all but exclusively with the social happenings of upper middle class Englishfolk in the years after the 2nd World War—but each one is excellent, her writing is taut, disciplined, mean and wry. Lots of good stuff in here, but The Flypaper, the lone horror story, deserves particular mention. As always, great to see New York Review of Book Classics bringing a deserving writer back to popular attention.

The Friends of Eddie Coyle by George V. Higgins – Hell of a crime novel, just a hell of a crime novel. Written almost entirely in dialogue, the story of Eddie Coyle, a small-time Boston fixer, and his attempts to get out of going to prison by selling out anyone and everyone he can. The story is strangely structured, and Higgins demands the reader do a lot of their own work in keeping track of the characters—but doing so is well worth the time, especially because the lack of a strong narrative presence serves to illustrate the degree to which crime is a meaningless, banal activity, nasty people doing nasty things. It's ferociously paced, it's mean, it's excellently written, it feels absolutely authentic. Strong recommendation.

Collected Short Fiction by V.S. Naipaul – Right, well, look, any honest list of the 10 best authors of the 20th century will have Naipaul on it. Top 20 certainly. There probably is not another writer alive who can claim so impressively diverse a body of work. These are good particularly the first part, his Miguel Street stories, about the lives of his neighbors in a Trindad side street. That said, some of the later ones flag a bit, and, to be blunt, this is probably not Naipaul at his best. If you haven't read him yet, and you really should, start with A Bend in the River if you want fiction or basically any of his non-fiction, particularly the ones having to do with India and Trinidad itself. Really this is more for the Naipaul completist, but still it's far from a waste of anyone's time.

Winter's Bone by Daniel Woodrell – Top notch, jet black hillbilly noir. The story of a young woman in the bleakest sort of Ozark poverty and her attempts to discover what happened to her unreliable, meth-cooking father, this is genre writing at its very highest point. No word here is wasted, the language is brutal and lovely, the dialogue incredibly sharp while still seeming authentic to the characters voicing it. It's really well plotted also, I can't really explain why without giving away essential points of the story, but it manages to avoid the whole it's-impossible-to-construct-an-authentic-mystery-without-constantly-lying-to-the-reader problem that all of us working in the genre struggle with. Just generally kick ass, give it a look.

Our Man in Havana by Graham Greene – Yeah, I mean, I read a lot of good stuff the last few weeks. Greene is just great, he's part of that generation of English novelists whose writing is a lot wittier than anyone else's ever was, and he used his significant life experience, in this case the time he spent working for British intelligence, to bleak and effective use. The story of a vacuum cleaner salesman who seeks to milk the secret service to pay off the debts of his profligate daughter, Our Man in Havana is laugh out loud funny, both in the its language and in its general condemnation of the pointless absurdity of the cold war and spying generally. Admittedly it feels a bit slight, particularly at the end (which wraps itself up rather too neatly), but still, tons of fun and definitely worth your time.

Enter A City Dreaming

As a general rule, I hate the metaphors and allusions which accompany most discussions about writing. Writers are, broadly, self-serious, sanctimonious, lazy people, who like to give the impression that sitting in an air-conditioned coffee-shop and hashing away at a lap top is an activity comparable to say, breaking rocks on the chain gang in the Alabama sun. My least favorite of all these is the 'a book is like a child' thing. Writing a book is nothing like having a child. This is an insane and foolish comparison. Having spent the last week looking after my brother's 20 month old son has really hammered this home. My book does not, for instance, take off all his pajamas in the middle of the night and then hose down his bedding with urine. My book does not demand that you play him the Raffi record when you are already playing him the goddamn Raffi record. My books do not wake me up before dawn, my books do not produce ear-splitting shrieks at inopportune moments, my books do not throw yogurt on the floor as soon as you turn your back on them. My books are also not freakishly adorable, but that's beside the point.

Here is another way that books are not like children—you get to pick favorites. Low Town/The Straight Razor Cure (really wish we'd stuck to one title!) gets all the love afforded to the eldest, and working on it made me realize that writing was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life, and selling it allowed me to wander through far corners of the planet and meet amazing people and have strange misadventures, and between all of those things I can even sort of forgive the various problems I now see in it. Tomorrow, The Killing, is mean and fast, like a sucker-punch to the gut, and it represented a big step forward in terms of my ability to plot coherently. She Who Waits wrapped up my first trilogy with a hard stop, granite hard, hard like the back of a stepfather's hand. The Empty Throne series was the most complex, difficult thing I've ever written, and forced me out of my intellectual comfort zone. The Builders is a book about anthropomorphic animals murdering each other in a setting resembling the American West, and if that's not enough to convince you to go out and purchase a copy, there is something deeply rotten in your twisted, black little soul. The point being, I like them all OK—if they were kids, which as I said they are not, they would be welcomed back for Thanksgiving dinner, and I would make a place for them even if it was on the couch, and try to avoid asking them about their romantic partners and life plans. No black sheep in this family.

But there is a golden son. City Dreaming like anything else I've ever written. I have an, admittedly self-serving but not therefore false, suspicion that it might not be like anything else you've ever read. It's about New York, sort of, and magic, sort of, and being young and quarrelsome, sort of. It's something of an urban fantasy, but one that's more about the strange and extraordinary thing that is a human city, rather than leather-clad supermen grimacing at one another and throwing fireballs at each other (although there's a little bit of that last one.) It's about M, a fast-talking wonder worker with a very dim sense of personal responsibility, who's preference is to spend his life drinking and playing chess and occasionally speaking to pretty woman, but who fate continuously forces into mystical misadventures. It's funny and fast paced and maybe even well-written. It will be available simultaneously in the UK and the US in October.

It was a true labor of love, and I'd really, really like to get you guys to read it. To that end, I'm going to do something which I don't really do for my books, indeed which goes against both my dislike of publicity and my general laziness, and that's to try and make a great big splash about it here on the interwebs. Over the next couple of months, I'm going to start posting reviews and blurbs, and putting up some short stories related to the world of A City Dreaming, and maybe have a contest or two, and just generally doing those sorts of things which wiser, more successful writers do as a matter of course. If you wanted to be a great big old sweetie, you might share these various advertisements, and comment on them, and pre-order the book, and grab your friends and casual acquaintances and demand that they pre-order it.

Cause frankly, if he don't sell well, I'm cutting him out of the will.

Books I Read, July 21 2016

Two days before my 32nd I decided the thought of facing a birthday in my usual environs was once I couldn't stand, and it turns out flights to Bogota are shockingly cheap, and so I hopped a plane down to Colombia. I have this long-standing policy that when traveling, I try and bring along books I couldn't bring myself to read if I was sitting in one place, so most of the last few weeks were spent walking along the city's and beaches and occasionally mountains of northern South America, eating street food, drinking cocktails, and reading impenetrably dense works of fiction, none of which I really enjoyed. Then I came home and promptly wrote the first half of this blog post, really, sincerely meaning to put it up on my website, because I have a website, goddamn it, and I might as well put something up on it. But things kept getting in the way; very long walks across New York, for instance, and this new book I've been working on, and drinking with friends, and occasionally chatting with a girl. And the list of things I read kept getting longer and I kept feeling less inclined to write these reviews, until there was a big stack of literature waiting to be shelved and I finally bowed to the wait of pressure. Update:: Actually, I didn't post this on time, so it's all about a month late. But then again, who cares.

The Night Manager by John Le Carre – look, you can't blame John le Carre for the Cold War ending, but the fact remains that his brand of endlessly elaborate, shades-of-gray political thrillers worked a lot better before the fall of the Berlin wall. There's nothing wrong about the Night Clerk except that anyone remotely familiar with anything else Lecarre has written can figure out what's going to happen from about 5% of the way in. Amoral politicians, shadowy bureaucrats, femme fatales, action scenes written in a fashion which denudes them entirely of excitement, they're all there. Which isn't to say it's bad, really, it isn't, it's quite readable, I finished it on the flight down to Bogota in pretty much one go. But it isn't exactly good, either, which is why I pretty much immediately forgot everything about it.

Beware of Pity Stefan Zweig – Having read this and the Chess Story, I confess I'm curious as to why this sudden critical rediscovery of Zweig has taken place. He's not bad, exactly, but there's nothing that I've seen in his writing which absolutely demands we all go back and take a look at him. Is it just illegitimate nostalgia for the last days of the Dual Monarchy? If so, I'll take Sandor Marai (read Embers if you haven't, lots of fun.) Anyway-- Beware of Pity of Guilt is aptly named, the story of a young cavalry officer who gets embroiled into a love affair with a crippled girl because he lacks the moral strength to cause her emotional injury, the end result of which is predictably terrible (all of this is revealed in the prologue, so I don't think I'm offering any spoilers). The introduction heralds Zweig for his familiarity with the then little known theories of Sigmund Freud, and for subverting the Christian paradigm of personal sacrifice as being an inevitable good, but that doesn't quite hold water for me. The notion that guilt could be a vice, one that a strong man ought rid himself of, goes back literally to Classical Greece (for Aristotle, the purpose of tragedy was to purge the viewer of their unhealthy inclination towards excessive sympathy), and any early 20th century intellectual worth his salt would have been familiar with Nietzsche and his whole strength through weakness thing. During his life, Zweig was famous mostly for his non-fiction, so maybe I'll pick up one of those before writing him off completely.

Petersburg by Andre Bely – I saw something which called Bely the Russian Joyce, and I was like, yes, sign me up for that one. But after six hundred pages, six hundred pages which went by like a root canal performed by a dentist with delerium tremens, I wish I hadn't. Not that the analogy is entirely inapt – both writers have a fascination with place, and with language at its most basic, that is to say with sound, and both enjoy intertwining earthy, almost silly sorts of humor with immense erudition. But I loved Ulysses and I kind of hated this, and I'm going to try and sort out why in the rest of this review.

Here's the thing about Ulysses, to go on a long digression, and why so few books which are compared to that masterwork actually deserve the analogy. Ulysses is, of course, unimaginably complicated—to understand it in its totality would require months of study, careful research, knowledge of many dozens of other authors, etc. But—and this is what makes the book so exceptional—even a much more casual reading will still reveal essential aspects of Joyce's message, a core understanding which makes you want to go back and put in the immense effort to more fully appreciate the complexities of the work. Fine, only an exceptional genius could easily comprehend (for instance) the night town chapter, but even an individual of my own modest capacity comes away from, say, Mollie's soliloquy in awe of its beauty and profundity. It's like one of those rubbery things you put in a bathtub that expand to a hundred times their own size, except the water is your intellectual effort. I'm not great at metaphors.

Petersburg by contrast, and frankly many other books in the modernist line, fail to accomplish this. I will not second guess Nabakov, who rated the book the 4th best novel of the 20th century, but there is very little to this which a casual reader will enjoy. The language is deliberately stilted to a maddening degree, the characters are not intended to be fully rounded. There is a certain amount of pleasure which can be derived from trying to uncover the little linguistic tricks which Bely incorporates into nearly every paragraph, but if you're anything like me you'll swiftly grow bored of it. I don't doubt that there is a core of brilliance here, but nothing about the book made me want to struggle to uncover it.

The Gray Notebook by Josep Pla – man, I hate writing negative reviews, it's tiring and it makes me feel nasty, even though the last three authors are long dead. Pla, apparently a giant of Catalonian literature, kept an intricate journal of the 22nd year of his life, writing down his experiences when an Influenza plague forced him to leave Barcelona for his small coastal village, as well as his time as a law student once the disease subsided. There is no plot to speak of, and nothing really happens, and that's a tough task to set oneself, and to surmount it one would need to be an excessively brilliant writer, and I didn't quite feel that Pla meets this high bar. For every bit that was funny, or engaging, or lovely sounding, there is a lot of gossip and X and things that I had no particular interest in. In fairness, at one point towards the end of the book Pla goes on a long soliloquy requesting that any theoretical readers consume the Gray Notebook in the same fashion which Pla created it, that is to say, in small bursts and over the course of months and even years. Not having abiding by his request, it may well be illegitimate for me to criticize it. I'd check something else out by him at some point in the future.

Wylder's Hand by J. Sheridan Le Fanu – It's peculiar how badly pulp literature ages. I'm not sure why that is, exactly, but here we go. A hundred and fifty years ago everyone in England had read Walter Scott, he was absolutely ubiquitous, he was more than a writer he was a cultural reference point. If you wanted (so I gather) to make fun of someone's intellectual pretensions you might say of them that they were big Walter Scott fans, that kind of thing. These days, who on Earth has even read the Waverly novels? Anyway, Wylder's Hand – it's a murder mystery, basically, with a touch of the supernatural. If condensed to about half the length—which, actually, wouldn't be all that difficult—it would be entertaining. The writing isn't bad and there's some pathos to it. But it's 500 pages instead of 200, and a lot of them don't add anything to the plot, and I was bored quite a bit, which is acceptable if you're reading, say, a cultural history of Victorian-era Britain but not for pulp. Skip.

The Hustler by Walter Tevis – Loved this. Loved it. The perfect antidote to the last five. The story of Fast Eddie's attempt to become the greatest pool player in America, a hill that he must climb over the corpse of Minnesota Fats (the names, right? The Names!) Fast, sharply written, a meditation on, basically, the Will to Power as expressed over a pool table. The character sketches are divine, I spent a lot of time reading it and laughing loudly in bars. Definitely check this out.

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn – As a general rule, books which become as popular as Gone Girl became are terrible. There is a simple enough reason for this – most people do not read books, or read very few books, and so those books which become ubiquitous are being consumed by many people who have very little practice in the skill of reading comprehension (and it is a skill), and so require a simplicity of language, character, and plot which mandate the books themselves must be trash. Dan Brown or The Girl Who... books are good example of absolute shit which is being swallowed by huge portions of the populace.

Gone Girl is not a good example of this. Gone Girl is, absolutely and unreservedly, fucking awesome. I would go so far as to say Gone Girl is one of the best noirs that has been written in the last half century, a devastatingly nasty, surprisingly traditional work of jet black pulp. To find something this mean and this good you pretty much need to go back to Jim Thompson, and there isn't much praise I can give higher than that. I won't bother with a discussion of the plot or whatever, since you've probably read it and if you haven't I don't want to spoil anything. But I will say a bit about it; Gone Girl works so well because it is built around archetypes and social dynamics which are familiar to the reader; the type A woman and her loser husband, the attempts of the former to make the latter palatable. It's genius (apart from the writing, and the pacing, and a great number of other things) is that it stretches these cliches to their extreme but still recognizable. It is shocking that Gone Girl became so popular, not only because it is so well-written, but because it's mean as hell, and it's mean in a recognizable way. Excellent, read if you haven't.

The Day of Creation by J.G. Ballard – My first Ballard! Late to the game, I know. Anyway, it's fabulous. Dreamlike, erotic, exciting, working as an adventure novel and as a philosophical discursion. Strange and sad and melancholic, as soon as I read it I ran out and bought a bunch more. Ballard deserves the accolades he gets.

The Day of Forever by J.G. Ballard – Yeah. Not bad, but actually not nearly as good as the two novels I've read. I did really like the one about the guy who has his town in the box, but a lot of them seem like kind of b-grade Twilight Zone stuff. Is there a stronger collection of short stories than this that someone can recommend?

High Rise by J.G. Ballard – Hahah! Hahah! Jesus, this was mean. Wow. Astonishing that Gone Girl was not the nastiest thing I read this month, but then again not much can rival this minor masterpiece. The story of how the population of a yuppie apartment building descending to unimaginable (though Ballard imagines them) depths of depravity and atavism, immeasurably foul and yet beautifully written, a critique of modernity which is stunning in its brutality. Wait, they made a movie out of this? How the hell could you make a movie out of this? It seems impossible. Anyway, I stayed up all night reading it and then couldn't sleep when I was done. Great stuff.

Books I read May 10th, 2016

Spring has been playing us all for mugs here in New York, showing up just long enough to get you to break out your sandals, then disappearing once your landlord had turned the heat off. Not one to be shut inside at the first drop of rain, I've been doing my forced march through the various boroughs, sticking my head in strange corners of the city, and writing (do check out the cover release for A City Dreaming, out next Fall!). I got nominated for a Hugo, which it turns out these days is a dubious distinction. I hung out with a bunch of old high school friends. I'm going to take an impromptu visit to Columbia on Wednesday, because flights were cheap and I've never been there and I don't like to be in the US on my birthday. Anyway, the last couple of weeks I read...

The Forty Days of Musa Dagh by Franz Werfel – An epic narrative recounting the attempt of a community of Armenians resiting their forced evacuation and ultimate destruction by the Ottoman authorities in the opening days of the first World War, by all accounts 40 Days of Musa Dagh was one of the earliest works to introduce to the Western world what would come to be known as the Armenian Genocide. It is epic in the classic sense, that is to say, vast in scope and scale, and also fairly action packed – much of it could double as an adventure book, were the circumstances not to horrible. It's odd that often you end up having more to say about a book that you disliked than about a book that you did. Musa Darh is a very good book, the writing is strong if a bit simple for my tastes, and the narrative complexity is impressive—Werfel often zigs when you think he's going to zag, and I found myself being surprised at numerous points in the book by some or other outcome. If you have it in you to read 1000 pages about the Armenian genocide, by all means, have at this one.

Roseanna by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö – The first of the Martin Beck books, others of which I have read out of order though I confess I think I liked this one more than the others that I picked up. In many ways this is the classic procedural novel, and there are many elements which it seems to have introduced broadly to the genre. Beck as a protagonist is spare almost to the point of nullity—we see him only by silhouette, and obliquely. Indeed the novel generally is terse enough to thrill a Spartan, with no wasted words or irrelevant details. Unfortunate that so much later Scandinavian noir – I'm looking at the rancid pile of trash which is The Girl Who... books—so manifestly fail to do everything which Swjowall and Wahloo do here so well. Strange to think that, in the decrepit state of modern crime, this would almost certainly fail to find an audience. There are no long scenes of sexual perversion, the villain is, as villains tend to be, small and stupid and mean, there is virtually no action. I suppose you can count that as a backhanded recommendation.

Journey by Moonlight by Antal Szerb – What fun! Gorgeously written, strangely compelling. Erotic, nostalgic, kind of impossible to describe in a useful way. About a Hungarian who takes a honeymoon trip to Italy with his wife, only to discover that having done so rips off his thin shred of bourgeoisie normality and plunges himself into the self-destructive passion of his youth. Also, the Nazis are coming. This was a bad summary, it's a hard book to summarize. Just read it.

The Man Who Went Up in Smoke by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö – The second of the Martin Beck books. Everything that applies to the previous review applies to this one as well. If you liked the first one, you'll like this. If you didn't, go put your hand on a hot stove, or read a James Patterson book, whichever seems likely to be more painful.

The Case of Comrade Tulayev by Victor Serge – Would anyone seriously dispute that the Russians have a genius for the novel which exceeds every other race on the planet, particularly when one considers the general weakness of the the Russian educational system and economy, historically and up to the present? Of course, Serge wasn't exactly Russian, indeed he wasn't exactly anything, a perpetual iconoclast, as all decent writers ought to strive to be. The story of how the murder of a high-ranking Soviet official ends in one of Stalin's many purges, and the individuals who get caught in the net, Serge combines an extraordinary sense of empathy with an unerring moral instinct, providing truly three-dimensional representations of very bad people, making them believable without ever forgiving their evils. I actually didn't find this one quite as compelling as Unforgiving Years, the oblique, difficult, and nightmarish quality of which is only hinted out here. Still, very strong, definitely worth reading.

Fake I.D. by Jason Starr– A very well done Jim Thompson pastiche. Credit where due, Starr has the classic noir line pat—stupid person makes bad decisions leading to an inevitable collapse. It's nasty and dark and well-written and compellingly readable, but it also hews so closely to the traditional run of these things that it's sort of hard to get super excited about it. It almost seems more like a writing exercise rather than an independent work. Not at all bad, though. I'd keep my eye out for more from the man.

The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers– Right. I think I have to come to accept that I just like Declare a lot more than Tim Powers other books. That's not really his fault, but here we are. Anubis Gates is not bad, Powers is enormously creative, and he has a good instinct for creating disturbing and horrific imagery. Still though, like some of his other stuff, I can't help but feel that the set up is a lot stronger than the ending. Pretty much the entire last half of this is a series of fairly elaborate set-piece battles, and honestly I get bored pretty quickly with that kind of thing—the hero dodges the bullet and leaps over the railing into the bar below and then kicks a guy and then dives through an opening and the fireball goes over his shoulder and so on and so on and so on. I like my action scenes tighter and nastier. Perhaps that's just a person peculiarity, but here we are. I found myself skimming a lot towards the end.

The Life of Lazarillo De Tormes by Anonymous – As I gather this is one of the first truly satirical novels in the history of fiction, about a poor peasant's quest to find a decent master. A series of vignettes poking fun at his social superiors and, in a deeper way, calling into question the morality of the entire system of Imperial Spain. Is it funny? Not really, most things aren't funny half a millennium after they've been written. More interesting as a historical curiosity than on its own merits (to most current readers, or so I suspect) but still it's only about a hundred pages so you could do worse than while away a beer with it.

Accepting a Hugo Nomination

If the infrequency of my blog and facebook posts, tweets, memes, pictures of cats doing silly things, etc, was insufficient evidence, I really don't get this social media/internet fandom thing. Mostly it just seems like a lot of folk bloviating on Facebook, and I prefer to do my bloviating in person, like at a party or a bar when you can pin a guy down and really annoy him. The whole Hugo controversy has been, historically, never a source of any particular concern for me. Occasionally I would brush up against it in the form of a facebook message or a blog post, would retreat rapidly as if touching a hot even and think to myself, 'thank God I'll never need to involve myself in that business.'

It is a good thing, a healthy thing, to be reminded every so often of how easy it is for life to make you a liar.

Some background: I wrote a book called The Builders, about a team of woodland animals called together for one final act of nefarious violence, sort of a Peckinpah Redwall. I like to think that it is funny, mean, and well-written. It is, indisputably, utterly apolitical. It sat on my hard drive for a while, and then the kind folk at Tor.com bought it for the new novella list they were putting together. People seemed to sort of like it, and it sold pretty well for a novella, and fans sent me cool art in the shape of the characters, and I cashed a check and felt generally good about myself. Maybe six weeks ago my editor at Tor contacted me to let me know I was part of the Rabid Puppy Hugo slate for best novella. (If you don't know who the Rabid Puppies are, I'm not going to get into it here. Google 'Hugo controversy', or better yet, go outside and take a long walk, or read a book, or hug a child. Your child, I mean. Or an appropriate child at least, not just anyone's child. Where were we?) My reactions were something like: “Who? Them? Why? Aren't they boycotting Tor? Do I know what the world 'boycott' means?” My team at Tor suggested it was best to just ignore the thing, and in deference to their greater expertise on the matter I decided to do just that, which played well to the broad apathy which is my defining characteristic. In retrospect I probably wish I had asked to be taken off said list, though apparently Alistair Reynolds did just that and had no luck. The matter seemed irrelevant when, midway through April, I had yet to be contacted from anyone at the Hugo's. It seemed my dreams of putting a silver phallus on my desk would have to be pushed back another year.

You can imagine my surprise when my twitter feed blew up Tuesday with the announcement that the Builders had been nominated in the best novella category.

That brings us to the present. It's been, frankly, a frustrating week. An essentially private person, I resent intensely having been dragged into a controversy which I had no role in creating and little interest in generally. My initial reaction was to withdraw from the contest immediately—I wrote a really nasty post to this effect, condemning all involved parties, raining rhetorical fire down from the sky, etc. 'A pox on both your houses! You won't have Dan Polansky to kick around anymore!' So on and so forth. But upon consideration, and in consultation with some of my fellow nominees, I've decided to stay in, which seems to be the least-worst option. I'm reasonably convinced it minimizes the harm which the organizers of the slate intended to do to the award itself. If you read the Builders, and you thought it was deserving of a Hugo, by all means, vote for it. If you preferred the work of one of the other fine nominees, vote for that. If you want to no-decision the lot of us, that's entirely understandable as well. As far as I'm concerned, that's the end of a matter which has already cost me more in terms of time and energy than I would have preferred to offer to anything that isn't my work, family, or friends.

But before I sign off, a quick word to those who are upset about the whole thing; don't let it get to you too much. Every moment you spend being angry, every furious blog post, every back and forth with a moron over twitter, is a small victory you have offered to your opponents. It is to you to decide if you are offended, angered, insulted. A righteous soul needs not concern themselves with the doings of fools.

As to the rest of you, the Oxford English Dictionary defines boycott as: to refuse to buy, use, or participate in (something) as a way of protesting : to stop using the goods or services of (a company, country, etc.) until changes are made.

Just, you know, as a head's up.

Books I read April 19th, 2016

Right. So the last two weeks Spring kind of finally came to the city, which actually didn't do much for my reading habit, because it became more fun to wander through distant corners of New York than it was to force myself to do much reading. I make myself write, that's just part of the gig, part and parcel, indivisible, that holy grind, that screeching monkey, God bless him, I'd be mad on my own. But yeah, apart from wandering around the city and putting some finishing touches on The City Dreaming, which is my soon to come work of profound genius, I read the following books.

The Emigrants by W.G. Sebold – I was walking home late one night from the harbor, and the gray fog rolled off the water, obscuring all the light of the city and leaving nothing but a great dim blankness in its place. Past the project houses on Atlantic that looked like nothing so much as as a vast corpse, further reminder of the dim futility of all of mankind's works, grandly conceived, laboriously acted upon, ultimately trivial against the endless yawning chasm of nothingness which rests, ever present, beneath us. I heard the sad, subdued laugh of a child, and I thought then of my old friend Alastair Cornwall, who had been my neighbor in a small, dilapidated hotel in the southwest of England, many years ago, after I had left the asylum but before I had entered the sanitarium. Alastair was a very talented musician, and in time he would grow to great fame for the curious pieces of music he created, which were written entirely for violins the strings of which have broken and for clarinets which had left to rust in an October rain storm. Of course Alastair did not live to learn of his own fame, taking his life one evening with an antique blunderbuss while the autumn boughs had turned bright red and gold, and leaving me with his sheets of music, all uncatalogued, as well as a photo album which contained many pictures of him, in some of which he was smiling, though it was only in film that I ever saw him do so...

Actually I liked this book, but, you know, Sebold kind of only has the one note.

Fair Play by Tove Jansson – Oh, I loved, loved, loved this book. A short hundred pages and I finished it one afternoon in the park, and I carried it around that evening waving it in front of me and hoping someone would ask about it so I could talk about how much I liked it, but no one did, so I'll have to tell you. A series of vignettes about (basically) Tove and her long-time lover, each small chapter is a small episode in the life of two people who have worn a groove in each other's lives after long decades of love. Of the things they take for granted about one another, of the small ways they hurt and help each other, of the kindnesses and misunderstandings. In short, it's about true, lasting long term love/. Every bit seems so real and lived in and true, and also Jansson is really a marvelously understated story-teller, allowing each point to hit with subtle clarity. It's gorgeous, it's a minor masterpiece, it's one of the best things I've read in a very long time. Loved it. Touched.

The Eve of St. Venus by Anthony Burgess – Funny! Slight, but funny. About a man who accidentally marries foam-born Aphrodite on the night before his wedding. It's small but it makes you laugh on near every page. Burgess is a talented comic writer. I often wonder why the mid-century Brits were so much better at this than everyone else, but never really came to a conclusion.

Books I Read This Winter (Part 4)

We are very nearly, brace, yourselves I know this is going to be a lot for you to handle, but we are very nearly at the end of my long backlog of books that I read this winter and didn't get around to reviewing because I was traveling/lazy. Which is good because we're getting towards spring here in the Apple, which means I walk more and write more and listen to more music and wave to more handsome young woman and so on and so forth. Except that actually we had this unfortunate cold snap the last couple of days, had to bundle up tight but it will likely be the last time the weather will be apporpriate to eat Ramen for a while. Anyway, here are some books I read, feel free to not read this, and to go do something more valuable with your time, like hugging your children or staring at a wall.

Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen – If one picks up whatever 1000 page opus the critics have dubbed this months novel of the century, the one that pretty girls in stockings and dashing your men in berets are very conspicuously reading on the L-train and at happy hour, and one discovers that it is a mound of feces doused in diesel and lit on fire, one is unsurprised. People are not very intelligent, and the intelligent ones least of all. But somehow one feels differently when it comes to books widely regarded as classics – surely our parents were wiser than we, one hopes, surely the collected judgment of the ages cannot be wrong.

All of which is to say that I was very much expecting to like Sense and Sensibility. I will go one further – I was quite looking forward to liking Sense and Sensibility, if for no other reason than to spite my 16 year old sell who loathed Pride and Prejudice, there being few sensations in life more pleasant than contempt for a previous personal iteration.

Alas.

In the credit column for Ms. Austen – she could give a good burn. There are some very sharp lines in here, so subtle that you miss the insult for half a paragraph after you read it.

In the debit column is literally everything else.

Her characterization is absolutely deplorable. Every person is introduced with a thumbnail sketch which lays out in numbing detail the handful of qualities which will define every interaction with said character for the remainder of the book. Elinor is sober and serious! Marianne is headstrong and passionate! Willoughby is handsome and rakish! If you managed somehow to skip one of these introductions, worry not, they will be repeated a rough 100 times throughout the course of the narrative. The plot is at once mind-numbingly tedious and absurdly melodramatic. Each surprise is telegraphed with a bluntness which would shame a third-rate mystery writer, for who, having been told that Willoughby is untrustworthy literally a dozen times in the first 50 pages, would be surprised that his union with poor Marianne does not come off as hoped? For that matter, the tension in the book is largely maintained by one of those absurd Victorian-era conceits whereby two characters cannot stand to have a simple conversation with one another about the immediate events of their life though those two characters have the most intimate relationship with one another (See also: Victor Hugo). Even by the bizarrely formalized etiquette of the era, surely it is not so terribly pushing the lines of gentility for Elinor to at some point go, 'yo, sis, you married to that dude, or what?' But it never seems to happen.

In short, Mark Twain and I are of one mind on the issue – 'I go so far as to say that any library is a good library that does not contain a volume by Jane Austen. Even if it contains no other book '

The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro – This is my first Ishiguro, and the only thing I knew about it going in was that there was some dispute when it first came out over whether it was 'really' genre fiction or something else, which is the sort of question than only an absolute idiot cursed to live forever and spend that sad eternity in a small room without internet access would bother to spend time discussing. But since we're on the subject, yes of course it's genre fiction, albeit of a very elevated type, which is to say the narrative is firmly in the fantasy mold but there's more to it then the usual 'wouldn't it be great if I was the chosen one, and no one at work could ever yell at me, and I had a pretty girlfriend.' I quite liked it – written with a lovely fairy tale style in which things don't quite make sense but somehow come together all the same, using a fascinating hybrid of Arthurian myth and pseudo-history, relevant to topics both political personal, sad, beautiful, mysterious, and with some fabulous sword fights. Really, really good sword fights. I like the idea of Ishiguro off in some remote English village and thinking, hmmmmm, what would a fight like this look like, and how would the duel progress, and the different stances, and so on. Definitely worth picking up.

The Black Envelope by Norman Manea – I've written before in this space about how foolish it is to decide a book is bad because you didn't understand it, and more generally of the terrible (and terribly frequent) error in imagining that no one could possibly be smarter than you are. Black Envelope is a difficult novel to review, in so far as despite a serious, determined effort, large portions of it remained essentially obscure to me. Part of that is deliberate – to the degree that there is a plot, large portions of it are never explained, nor does it come to any sort of concrete resolution. Likewise, the reader is obviously meant to be experiencing, to some limited degree, the same feelings of frustration, futility, and lingering madness are as the characters, laboring beneath the oppressive regime of Romanian communism. Still--is it fair to complain about a book being too gnomic, when that is so clearly the author's intent? If so, then I am hereby officially complaining about it. What I got of the book did not make me sufficiently enthusiastic to give it a second reading which might have clarified more of it. Or to put it another way – there is surely something of value here, but you are almost certainly not going to be the one to find it.

Classic Crimes by William Roughhead – So this was a lot of fun. A collection of true-crime essays, mostly from the 19th century, mostly taking place in Glasgow. Roughhead writes in a style which is at once erudite and readable, and anyone who enjoys outdated slang will have a field day here; I particularly enjoyed Swarfed, meaning fainted, and Kitchen Fee, referring to the ends of leftover food given away to the poor as charity. The crimes are morbid, cruel, and fascinating, lovers poisoning each other slowly with arsenic, the brutal murder of a brother by her half-sister, and Roughhead's discussion of the court cases these crimes give rise to, the frequent incompetence and occasional excellence of the investigators, the fearless disinterest of the accused, the brilliance of some or other lawyer, are a pleasure to read. Recommended if you have any interest in this sort of thing at all.

The Nimrod Flipout: Stories by Etgar Keret – My second collection of Keret's short stories has made me a believer, this guy is the truth. A series of strange, sad, funny short stories, rarely amounting to more than five or ten pages, almost every one of which is a gem. Keret has a real feel for the young male psyche, and many of the stories in this book amount to examinations of masculinity through the lens of a fantastical premise. I hesitate to discuss any of them in detail because they are so brief that a thumbnail sketch serves to ruin the punchline, but suffice to say it is magical realism at its best, using an absurd premise to effectively observe or comment on some aspect of human existence. Keret succeeds in creating entire worlds in very short spaces, doing more with a handful of paragraphs than many writers do with entire novels. Absolutely worth checking out.

The Duel by Casanova – I've never ready any portion of Casanova's biography, though this brief snippet, recalling a pistol duel he fought with a Polish noble while in exile from his native Venice, really made me want to check the entire thing out. It reads like an amoral adventure novel, with the added joy of Casanova's well-earned cynicism about the world and the sad, proud, stupid, creatures who inhabit it.

Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi– A fun little children's story, differing from the Disney version we're all familiar with in so far as Pinnochio begins the story as a horrible little bastard, only gradually improving as a result of his frequent, largely self-inflicted misfortunes. Like all good fantasy, nothing in it ever makes sense, but it doesn't make sense in an entirely understandable way, if you can dig it. I'll read it to my nephew when he's old enough to sit sill for five minutes at a time.

Bunny Lake is Missing by Merriam Modell – The story of a young, single mother in New York, desperately trying to convince the police and various other (male) authorities that her young daughter has been kidnapped, three-quarters of the way through I was ready to anoint this book a work of genius. Sharp, tautly written, disturbing in the extreme, leaving the reader less and less certain about the mental state of the protagonist, making us uncomfortable with our inability to trust her. If this has been a work of 'literature', that is to say, not initially intended as a mass market paperback, and therefore a book which needed to work itself into a comfortable narrative framework, I imagine the author might have felt more comfortable dropping us off a cliff at the climax. Alas, it being what it was the whole thing wraps up in a way which is at once a) absolutely incoherent and b) entirely in keeping with the traditional gender norms which the rest of the book implicitly and explicitly subverts. Read the first 150 pages and then go do something else.

The Door to Bitterness by Martin Limon – Yeah, not bad. There's an unfortunate tendency to herald crime novels in foreign settings simply for being based in an area which the reader might be unfamiliar with (see the atrocious Mapuche, most of Scandanvian noir, etc.), at the expense of narrative, characterization, etc. But everything here is serviceable is not exceptional, and the set-up – the heroes are military police in the US army stationed in South Korea in the 60's – is legitimately interesting. I'd pick up another if I found one.

Books I Read This Winter (Part 3)

I am getting as tired of writing these are you are of (not) reading them. What is it that keeps me doing these review? Just some peculiar, unfortunate tendency on my part towards cataloging everything I do? Am I secretly a hoarder, with last week's bowel excretions neatly labeled in jars in my closet? How did we get in this direction? Can I write exclusively in interrogatives? Did I drink several IPAs before writing this?

Dunno, probably, no, dunno, no, yes. What follows are the books I read, roughly, since returning from Africa at the end of February till like last week.

Mapuche by Caryl Férey – This book was just a steaming pile of shit, no way around it. Absolutely rank – it's bizarre the degree to which literary mediocrity can be forgiven if it's sort of nominally in the service of a leftist ideal. Don't take that last sentence as evidence of any particularly political leaning on my part. Anyway, this thing is just awful, it makes Girl With a Dragon Tattoo look like high literature by comparison. Maybe not quite. But they have a lot in common – a foreign setting; in this case, Buenos Aires. A weirdly outdated political background; the Dirty Wars of the 70's and 80's which, look, if you were unaware of it the proto-fascists were awful and to the degree to which the US provided support both tacit and outright, that's pretty shameful, but on the other hand, it is the rough equivalent of writing a thriller set in DC in which the bad guys are Ollie North and the other Watergate cronies, not exactly cutting edge. Sexual politics; this is a book which nominally stakes out feminist territory but also has just a ton of sexual violence towards women, intimately described, to the point where it's hard not to feel like you're just reading chapters of BDSM erotica. And, most importantly, aesthetics, in so far as every line is badly written, the dialogue is atrocious, the characterization is beyond one dimensional, the mystery itself is non-existent, violence is used again and again to lazily resolve conflicts. It's just awful, stay away from it.

The Ancient City by Fustel De Coulanges – This one was pretty fascinating, actually. The essential idea is that no one living in the modern age (although actually the book was written in the 19th century) can adequately understand the thinking of the citizens of early Classic Greece and Rome, whose lives were entirely structured around a very primitive form of Indo-Aryan ancestor worship. To Coulanges's mind, every facet of early Classical civilization needs to be explained from this fundamental core, that is to say according to sort of magical thinking about the ability of the dead to bless or curse their descendants, and a reverence for the hearh and home which is in no way symbolic but entirely concrete. All the duties and responsibilities of the citizen grew out of the initial concept of this priesthood, in which the male head of the household is the only person capable of performing the obeisances and sacrifices required to satisfy the dead. It's hard going but extremlely interesting, and to my very limited knowledge of that period of history, seems coherent, but to be blunt I am nowhere near sufficiently versed in Classical theory to know if it is still held in high regard. Anyone want to help me out on this?

The Penguin History of Early India: From the Origins to Ad 1300: Volume 1 by Romila Thapar – Pretty much what the title says. Reasonably readable given the complexity of the subject matter.

King Charles III of Spain by Sir Charles Petrie – A reasonably competent history of one of Spain's relatively few reasonably competent Kings. How did Spain manage to take over most of the world having had like, three monarchs that weren't complete shit in their entire history? Anyway – apart from a tendency towards long, unrelated digressions about British diplomats credentialed to the court at Madrid, and an exaggerated view of the importance of Spain during this ear (mid-late 18th century) this was fine. If that doesn't sound like an overly passionate recommendation, I guess it probably isn't.

The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History by Robert Darnton – Essentially an attempt to recreate the mindset of the French proletariat and petit bourgeoisie during the 18th century. I thought it was enjoyable and interesting but then I love this sort of investigative history. Although I will admit the subject is a bit abstract and I can imagine for a lot of people it would be dull to tears. But screw those people, I dug it.

The Police of Paris 1718-1789 by Alan Williams – An interesting topic which is lamentably undercut by the author's unfortunate tendency towards an ornate, even rococo, academic style. A lot of simple sentences made opaque. Which is too bad because there's a lot of fun stuff in here regarding Parisian coppers in the years before the Revolution, during a period of time when they were basically responsible for overseeing all the features of civil government in the city, from trash collection and torch lighting to the censorship of books and putting out fires. It could certainly have benefited from a bit more by way of anecdote by then, as we established in the first sentence, this seems very deliberately to be written in a fashion so as to squeeze all the fun out of the topic. The flaws of modern academic writing are so peculiar because they are learned failures, that is to say, no one starts out writing this bad. At some point, basically, entire generations of students are taken aside by some professor and told, 'hey bud, if you want to turn this Masters into a PHD you need to do a better job of making what you're saying less clear.' Still, not without its merits.

Envy by Yuri Olesh – Look, I've probably just read too much Soviet-era magical realism. Between this and The Foundation Pit and like a dozen other one's I can't remember, they've all kind of run together in my head. My fault entirely, the book deserved more diligent study, but I just couldn't bring myself to offer it right now. I'm sorry. I'M SORRY. STOP YELLING AT ME, PLEASE PLEASE STOP YELLING AT ME.

The Dark Tunnel by Ross MacDonald – Ross MacDonald is a fabulous crime writer, his Lew Archer stuff is right up there with Chandler and Hammet's best, but this book, a Nazi-thriller in the cheapest possible mold, is not very good. MacDonald presumably knew this as well, which is why it was originally released under a different name. It very much has the feel of something thrown together in about two weeks to pay off a bar tab. In fact, thinking up the circumstances of how so talented a writer ended up writing something of such abundant mediocrity is of more interest than reading the actual book. Maybe a relative had been kidnapped, and he needed a thousand dollars or they'd be shot? Maybe it was a bet that he lost? Maybe he met a young child dying of cancer who was like, 'hey mister, mister, can you write me a Nazi novel? One where an incoherent chase scene makes up most of the 2nd third of the book, and the ending is weirdly telegraphed? Cough-cough?' and Ross MacDonald, being a decend fellow was like, '...sure, Timmy' (the kid's name is Timmy) 'and then we'll get you that new lung you need. You'll...you'll be out of here by Christmas!'

Also, I love how on the front cover of the Goodreads picture (not my cover, sadly) the tag line is 'The Story of a Homosexual Spy!'

City of Bohane by Kevin Barry – One of these books that you start and immediately know you're going to love, one of those books where you go, 'right, this is why I spend all of my time and most of my money reading.' What genre writing could be if we were all smarter than we are. Written in this bizarre but understandable future slang, the story of an imaginary city in a post-collapse era on the West Coast of Ireland and the criminal gangs which feud there. Violent, nostalgic, lovely, sad, beautiful, I just loved this book. You should absolutely read it. I wish I had gotten to it before I had written Low Town, I could have stolen a lot from it.