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Summary of recent reading
Sep. 25th, 2007 10:32 pmOh, the reading. It doesn't end, and there's no keeping up with it. Yet for some reason I have this desperate wish to continue to record my responses to all of it. I've decided that I'll leave aside the articles, essays, short stories, criticism, excerpts, etc (unless one of them should happen to be particularly earth-shattering), and post only about novels and of those only the ones I read in something resembling their entirety. Also, what I end up posting will probably be shorter, vaguer, and more impressionistic than it has been in the past, and thus perhaps comprehensible only to myself. Such is life.
Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald: This is the most difficult book I've read in ages. Dense, erudite, impenetrable, cold. Sebald builds a vast fortress of prose around the horror that forms the core of the novel: the Holocaust and Austerlitz's gradual discovery of his mother's fate in Theresienstadt. We are allowed to know that this horror exists, but we are kept always on the other side of the fortress walls. Does Sebald suggest that this is only possible way of writing about the unspeakable, much as closing himself behind his learning is the only way for Austerlitz to live with the unlivable? Weeks after finishing it, I am left with nothing but the impression of barrenness, metallic cold, glacial slowness, and fear.
The Guide by R.K. Narayan: This is the first of Narayan's novels that I've read, and I was bothered by it in the same way I'm always bothered by stories that sacrifice psychological verisimilitude for the sake of plot. Raju, the main character, begins the book as an unethical, opportunistic, but essentially likable fellow; as the story goes on he transforms first into a money-grubbing, misogynistic, self-serving asshole, and then into some semblance of a holy man. I don't have a problem with characters undergoing changes, but none of these changes felt organic to me and they foiled my attempts to connect with the book on an emotional level. I will say, however, that the final image of Raju collapsing while he feels the water rising around his legs is poignant, enduring, and powerfully drawn.
Angels and Insects by A.S. Byatt: I loved this. Loved it to death. The book is composed of two novellas: "Morpho Eugenia," about natural selection, insects, blindness both willful and otherwise, and love in various guises; and "The Conjugial Angel," about spiritualism, seances, Alfred Tennyson, and love--of the dead, of the flesh, and of the sort that dare not speak its name. I liked "Morpho Eugenia" better, but both novellas are excellently dark and creepy, and rich with meaningful historical detail--the sort of thing that Byatt does best.
If on a winter's night a traveler by Italo Calvino: At last, an author who uses his first name instead of initials! I am not sure about this book. I loved the first four or five chapters, loved the way the "novels" drew me in, loved the sudden reversal when I realized that the true story of the book lay in the numbered rather than the named chapters...but then the book started swallowing its own tail. Somewhere around chapter 7 the narrative vanished into a cloud of increasing complexity and self-referentiality, and my willingness to play along vanished with it. I think Calvino has interesting things to say about the nature of reading, but they don't make for a compelling novel.
Baumgartner's Bombay by Anita Desai: Another Holocaust book, and one that is much more in touch its emotions than Austerlitz. Like Jacques Austerlitz, Hugo Baumgartner loses his mother and lives on as a forever-dislocated human. Austerlitz retreats into education, but Baumgartner just retreats into himself, withdrawing further and further from other humans. He has to be one of the loneliest characters in fiction. This was not a particularly enjoyable book, but it was interesting enough to make me want to seek out more of Desai's work.
Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald: This is the most difficult book I've read in ages. Dense, erudite, impenetrable, cold. Sebald builds a vast fortress of prose around the horror that forms the core of the novel: the Holocaust and Austerlitz's gradual discovery of his mother's fate in Theresienstadt. We are allowed to know that this horror exists, but we are kept always on the other side of the fortress walls. Does Sebald suggest that this is only possible way of writing about the unspeakable, much as closing himself behind his learning is the only way for Austerlitz to live with the unlivable? Weeks after finishing it, I am left with nothing but the impression of barrenness, metallic cold, glacial slowness, and fear.
The Guide by R.K. Narayan: This is the first of Narayan's novels that I've read, and I was bothered by it in the same way I'm always bothered by stories that sacrifice psychological verisimilitude for the sake of plot. Raju, the main character, begins the book as an unethical, opportunistic, but essentially likable fellow; as the story goes on he transforms first into a money-grubbing, misogynistic, self-serving asshole, and then into some semblance of a holy man. I don't have a problem with characters undergoing changes, but none of these changes felt organic to me and they foiled my attempts to connect with the book on an emotional level. I will say, however, that the final image of Raju collapsing while he feels the water rising around his legs is poignant, enduring, and powerfully drawn.
Angels and Insects by A.S. Byatt: I loved this. Loved it to death. The book is composed of two novellas: "Morpho Eugenia," about natural selection, insects, blindness both willful and otherwise, and love in various guises; and "The Conjugial Angel," about spiritualism, seances, Alfred Tennyson, and love--of the dead, of the flesh, and of the sort that dare not speak its name. I liked "Morpho Eugenia" better, but both novellas are excellently dark and creepy, and rich with meaningful historical detail--the sort of thing that Byatt does best.
If on a winter's night a traveler by Italo Calvino: At last, an author who uses his first name instead of initials! I am not sure about this book. I loved the first four or five chapters, loved the way the "novels" drew me in, loved the sudden reversal when I realized that the true story of the book lay in the numbered rather than the named chapters...but then the book started swallowing its own tail. Somewhere around chapter 7 the narrative vanished into a cloud of increasing complexity and self-referentiality, and my willingness to play along vanished with it. I think Calvino has interesting things to say about the nature of reading, but they don't make for a compelling novel.
Baumgartner's Bombay by Anita Desai: Another Holocaust book, and one that is much more in touch its emotions than Austerlitz. Like Jacques Austerlitz, Hugo Baumgartner loses his mother and lives on as a forever-dislocated human. Austerlitz retreats into education, but Baumgartner just retreats into himself, withdrawing further and further from other humans. He has to be one of the loneliest characters in fiction. This was not a particularly enjoyable book, but it was interesting enough to make me want to seek out more of Desai's work.
