The Kindly Ones – Jonathan Littell: Part 1 (Pages 1-40)

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I’ve gotten bored of writing structured, essay-style book reviews, and thought I’d give something different a try.  My aim in writing reviews is to provide readers with an idea of if they’d enjoy it, but also to help me reflect on the book.  To focus more on the latter, instead of waiting until I finish a book to write a post on it, I’ll try blogging as I go.  Hopefully, this will get me writing more and help me capture what it’s actually like to read the book.  I’ll also be trying to write in a style that is more personal than critical, more fan-boy than academic.  Let me know what you  think.

And now, our feature presentation…

My sister gave me The Kindly Ones for Christmas in 2010, and despite her strong recommendation, it has sat on the bookshelf unread ever since.  I was put off in part by its near thousand-page size, and in part by the critical acclaim plastered all it: “A great work of literary fiction, to which readers will turn for decades to come”; “A tour de force”;  “A monument of contemporary literature.”  There’s even a little red, round sticker on the front cover saying “Profoundly important” (this makes me wonder if it was stuck there on the production line, or if it was shipped out to bookstores later and bookstore clerks had to go around sticking little red, round stickers on every copy).  I don’t know if I’m alone in this, but since out-of-context praise sprouts on every book cover, I don’t put much value on it.  The more hyperbolic these quotes are, the more suspicious I am of them.

What really made me wary of The Kindly Ones, though, was that it’s about two subjects I’ve lost interest in reading about: World War II and the Holocaust.  This isn’t to say that I don’t recognise the scale and importance of these historic tragedies.  It’s just that they have been tackled so often and so well in literature and movies that I believed there was nothing new to say about them.

Various Pets Alive and Dead – Marina Lewycka

This review was originally published on the excellent LiteraryMinded.  Thanks to Angela Meyer for the opportunity, and the free book.

The title of Various Pets Alive and Dead might make you think it involves lots of cute animal stories and some kind of furry genocide. Instead, it’s a very political novel about the global financial crisis and the failure of the leftist ideals, played out through the intergenerational conflict of a family of hippy-commune escapees. This probably doesn’t sound like the most fertile ground for a comic novel, but its author, Marina Lewycka, milks the politics for as many laughs as possible, and even manages to throw in the odd ill-fated hamster or doomed family of rabbits.

Lewycka’s fourth novel, Various Pets Alive and Dead tells the story of Serge and Clara, and their mother Dora, who, along with her partner Marcus and the other quirky members of their collective, raised her children in an old country house on a healthy diet of free love, socialism and lentils.

Shibuya No Love – Hannu Rajaniemi

I was clicking around the always excellent Guardian Books page, source of many a mid-work literature fix, when I came across this interview with Hannu Rajaniemi.  He seemed endearingly down to earth, is a fellow Murakami fan and his novel, The Quantum Thief, sounded like an interesting concept, so I followed the link to the first piece he had published, Shibuya No Love. 

I enjoyed the story, but it’s clearly the work of an inexperienced, though talented, writer.  It can be instructive to read the work of less polished authors, though, because the visible seams make it easier to understand what works, and what doesn’t.

After Dark – Haruki Murakami

Considering some of Murakami’s stories involve dancing dwarves, talking cats and sheep with plans for world domination, you’d expect a novel in which he explores Tokyo’s dark side to be pretty damn strange.  But surprisingly, After Dark is one of his less weird novels.  Sure, a girl gets trapped inside a TV set for a bit, but that’s as mundane as a walk to the shops for this author.

Most of the action in After Dark takes place in an unnamed entertainment district, one of those places like Shibuya that lend themselves to stereotypical images of modern Japan, full of giant television screens, neon signs and pay-by-the-hour “love hotels”.  Murakami perfectly captures the nightlife and atmosphere of Tokyo: the salary men rushing for the last train; the constant traffic of kids heading between convenience stores and karaoke bars; the scavenging rats, cats and crows. 

Candy – Luke Davies

There are lots of stories about drug addiction out there.  It’s a subject that will always attract readers because, while most people wouldn’t want to experience something like a heroin habit, many would want to understand why drug addicts find it so hard to give up.  It’s also a topic ripe for fictionalisation, with its ready made tension between addiction and rehabilitation, crime and punishment, as well as the constant threat of death lurking in the background.

But while there many books that tackle the same issue, I couldn’t imagine a more authentic depiction of heroin addiction than Luke Davies’ Candy.  Like the novel’s narrator, Davies had a smack habit for over a decade, and his hard won experience allows him to achieve a novel that is harrowing and poignant and overflowing with unmistakable truth.  In Candy, there is no of the glorification of a sex and drugs and rock’n’roll counter-culture, no breaking of taboos, none of the mad freedom of Hunter S. Thompson or Jack Kerouac. Just a steady descent into addiction that destroys the lives of two beautiful young people.

The Finkler Question – Howard Jacobson

The Finkler Question won the 2010 Man Booker Prize, and received glowing reviews from in The Guardian and The New York Times, but if the luke-warm response from my book club and the three star rating on Amazon.com is anything to go by, this book typifies the chasm between critics and the everyday literature reader.

This is not to say that Howard Jacobson’s novel is terrible.  It is funny and well written with some fantastic, witty similes.  But it also self-conscious and trying, and has a central theme which many readers will not engage with.

Freedom – Jonathan Franzen

Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom was one of the most critically acclaimed novels of 2010, lauded as a potential Great American Novel.  Through a white, middle-class, liberal lens, it focuses on people’s struggles to define themselves, through marriage, or rebellion, or altruism.  It has been described as Dickensian in the scale of its plot and social commentary, although the author forgoes inequality and injustice for corporate corruption and environmentalism.

The novel opens with a section that focuses on the residents of the newly-gentrified suburb of St. Paul, and the narrow-minded suburban gossip that circulates about one family in particular, the Berglunds.  Walter and Patty Berglund were “the young pioneers of Ramsay Hill”, he a good-natured small town boy who was “greener than Greenpeace”; she a former jock who became a stay-at-home mum and “a sunny carrier of sociocultural pollen, an affable bee.”  They have a precocious son, Joey, and a daughter, Jessica, who is practically forgettable in terms of the narrative.

The Romantic: Italian Nights and Days – Kate Holden

As a guy, The Romantic wasn’t the easiest novel to read in public.  First, there’s the girly title.  Then, there’s the cover – a nude woman  lying with one breast slightly exposed – that made me worry people would think I was reading the book equivalent of Zoo.

I could get around this by reading with the novel flat against a coffee-shop table, or on my lap when I was reading on the bus, but this presented a new problem – the curious passenger.  See, people who don’t bring a book or iPod on the bus get understandably bored and look around at what their neighbours are doing.  And since The Romantic has generous lashing of sex throughout, and people only pick up the a few words when glancing at a page, anyone who sat next to me over the past week probably knows me as “the guy who reads porno on the bus”.

Oh, well.  It was worth it, not just because I’ll probably have a two-seater to myself from now on, but because The Romantic was damn good.  It’s beautifully written, brutally honest, and, yes, very sexy.

God of Speed – Luke Davies

As I was reading God of Speed, I tried not to think of the episode of The Simpsons that parodies Howard Hughes, when Mister Burns opens a casino, secludes himself on the top floor and becomes a germaphobe.  Because it’s hard to engage with a novel when you’re picturing its protagonist like this:

It was a toss-up between this, or “Freemasons run the country”

Unfortunately for old Howard, there’s a fair bit of truth to this impersonation.  He spent the last ten years of his life crippled by obsessive compulsive disorder, living in hotels and fleeing the tax collector.  He was waited on by an army of Mormons, who were the only people he believed he could trust, and to whom he wrote instructions that were so exact they specified the number of Kleenex to use when picking up his hearing-aid, or how many inches to park from the curb.

For much of his life, though, Hughes was the king of the world, and he looked like this:

Handsome bastard.  In addition to being really, really good looking, Hughes had more money than God, a Hollywood studio, multiple world air-speed records and bedded most of the famous, beautiful women of his era, including Katherine Hepburn, Bette Davis, Ava Gardner and Gene Tierney, to name but a few.

So what the hell happened to him?  In God of Speed, Luke Davies attempts to get inside Hughes’ head to answer this question and explore the genius and madness of this icon of the 20th century.

On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft – Stephen King

Review by Gabriel

When I was a kid, probably around 9 or 10, I was obsessed with the telemovie of Stephen King’s It.  I recorded it straight from TV, with my thumb poised over the pause button so I could cut out all the ads.  I watched the tape so many times that the whole movie looked like it took place in a snowstorm, especially the scene where Bill Denborough slingshots a silver marble into Pennywise the Clown’s head.  At school, I made an It club, and suddenly thought stutters and Ventolin puffers were cool.  I don’t know what it says about me that I was obsessed with a movie about an evil shape-shifting clown that killed children, but that’s how it was.

To become the school/world authority on all things It, I also bought the 1000 plus page monster of a novel.  I gave it my best shot, but there were just too many descriptions and boring stuff about adults for me to make it much further than twenty pages.

It wasn’t until a good ten years later that I finally got around to reading the novel.  It was a little different from my beloved childhood telemovie.  The basic plot was the same, but there were also astral tongue biting duels, kids having group sex and a cosmic turtle.  I remember finding it readable and enjoyable, but not being overly impressed.  Around the same time, I read The Stand, another King epic.  Now, I generally like the idea of apocalyptic novels, but The Stand turned me off with its overt religiousness and its bland, cliché interpretation of evil.

All of which is a long-winded, self indulgent way of saying I have a long history with King, but I’m not a big fan of his fiction.  I am, however, a huge fan of this book, On Writing.