The Close-Read: The First 48 Words of Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami

I so enjoyed participating in last month’s 1book140 read-a-long of The Blind Assassin that  I am coming back for July’s pick, Kafka on the Shore. Last time, I wrote about just the first sentence of The Blind Assassin. This time, I managed to make it through the first 48 words. Disclosure: I have read The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle but no other Murakami. Also, I have only read the first 48 words, so any correct guesses or horrible misses here should be judged accordingly.

Here’s what I saw.

1.  The preface’s title, “The Boy Named Crow,” is deceptively simple. On its surface, this is a basic bit of information: this section is about a boy whose name is Crow. If our eye catches anything, it’s the unusual name “Crow,” but I think the telling part is the more subtle, “named.” We might think that Crow is some kind of nickname, but the “named” indicates that it is quite intentional—this is not an acquired name, it is an original. Now who did the naming is less clear; conventional reading would suggest that this was his given name, but there is also the possibility that Crow gave himself this name. (I think the rest of the first paragraph supports this theory, but more on that in a moment.)

Anyway, the point here is that someone wanted this kid to have a weird name. If it was his parents, then he is that kid with parents who wanted him to have a weird name. If he named himself Crow, then he is the kid that gave himself a weird name. Either of these kids is to be monitored closely.

2011 Tournament of Books: Breaking Down Week Two

After my stellar week one performance, my match predictions for week two went directly into the proverbial tank. That's bad for my bracket, but great for the post-match commentary....commentary. Here's what stuck out to me from Matches 5-8.... (and here's last week's round-up for Matches 1-4)

Match 5 Winner: Nox

Match 5: Nox by Anne Carson versus Lord of Misrule by Jaimy Gordon, judged by Andrew Womack.


Womack on Nox:


"Still, I was wondering, does it qualify as a contender here? I’m still not completely sure. If there were a nonfiction version of the Tournament of Books, I decided, this work wouldn’t fit so neatly in there, either. It’s part-this and part-that, and no one except the author, and probably not even her, can know which are which."


The tacit understanding behind the Tournament of Books is that it really is a Tournament of Novels (almost exclusively in English). Could the net be cast wider? Probably, but the judging would have more of these types of reactions. Judging (and reading judging) is really only satisfying if the contestants exist on the same plane because what we like about judging is the close assessment of the virtues of objects within a category, not the virtues of the category itself. If I ask "what do you like better: a banana or The Godfather Part II," chances are you won't be comparing De Niro's acting to potassium levels; you'll be debating the qualities of food versus the quality of film. 

Match 6 Winner: Next

Match 6: Next by James Hynes versus So Much for That by Lionel Shriver, judged by Jessica Francis Kane

Kane on So Much for That:

"Every character can and does at some point deliver a diatribe on one issue or another with fluid sentences and the right vocabulary, making them really qualified to testify before Congress, but a little less compelling as fictional creations."


Social issue novels, like comedic novels, don't age particularly well; so much of what they do depends on the concerns of the day that once the calendar flips, the impact of the novel fades. The few that do manage to last tend to have characters that transcend their particular "issue." As Kane notes, the characters in So Much for That are so aware that they are living lives embroiled in "social issues" that it prevents them from having much independent identity. Now, I think So Much for That could have made the characters' awareness of social issues itself a "social issue': it seems interesting that we do have a surplus of canned cultural criticism at the ready. In So Much for That, this is not at all helpful in solving real problems; the only thing that solves problems is decisive action (let's ignore for a minute that this decision action requires nearly a million dollars in cash and a new life in a third world country where the money will last a lifetime to work). 

Match 7 Winner: Model Home

Match 7: Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart versus Model Home by Eric Puchner, judged by Matthew Baldwin

Baldwin on Super Sad True Love Story:

I got exactly as far as “UnitedContinentalDelamerican” before giving up on Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story, which is to say about halfway through page one. If my 40 years on this big blue marble have taught me one thing, it’s that hyperbolic corporate portmanteaus are the hallmark of wacky five-minutes-in-the-future dystopias. And that, unfortunately, is a class of literature of which I have had my fill.

Baldwin on Model Home:

Set in 1985, Eric Puchner’s debut novel documents a nuclear family on the cusp of detonation.


Somehow in Baldwin's reading experience, novels about the problems of the nuclear family rarer than comic dystopian novels. (I would imagine that anyone who reads literary fiction with some consistency would find this...striking). This is a secondary problem of judging categories rather than subjects--biases for or against a class become the vectors of analysis, rather than the particular qualities of each. To continue the above example of categorical judging: That Baldwin eats a lot of bananas biases him against finding a particular banana desirable, and that he hasn't seen many mafia movies predisposes him to be delighted by The Godfather II. 

Match 8 Winner

Match 8: The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender versus Bloodroot by Amy Greene, judged by Catherine George

George's verdict:

So. Bloodroot, a story that might’ve caught me if it hadn’t been so obscured by its own words, versus Particular Sadness, a fine example of craft that just didn’t move me. Who wins? In the end, Particular Sadness chalked up a bunch of extra points for technical merit, and today, that’s all it needed to move forward.


This was perhaps my favorite moment from the first round judging. Why? Well, George's description of the strengths and weaknesses of the novels lines up with my own, yet she comes to a different verdict. Her preference for craft leads her to prefer (slightly) The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake. My preference for interesting messes over bloodless craft leads me to prefer (slightly) Bloodroot. This then is not a disagreement, but an exposure of different value systems. This moment reminds me of the subjectivity of my own taste and gives me access to someone else's subjectivity---to my mind this can only enrich the reading experience. 
__________________________


I'll be doing a similar work-up after this week's round two judging, already underway, when it's wrapped up.
__________________________

Buy books mentioned in this post (or anything else, actually) using the below links, and The Reading Ape gets a small referral fee to defray our nominal operating costs.

Lord of Misrule by Jaimy Gordon: Brief Review and Giveaway

I probably never would have picked up Jaimy Gordon's Lord of Misrule had it not won the National Book Award, but, thankfully, it did. My brief review is below, but more to the point, I'm pleased to have a copy to give to an interested reader. If you'd like to be entered in the drawing, please send an email with the subject line LORD OF MISRULE to readingape AT gmail DOT com. Entries will accepted until Friday March 11th at 11:59 pm EST. 

_________________________________________

There's something about the coexistence of sadness and romance in horse-racing that's hard to pin down; while its halcyon days are long past, horse-racing retains some of the pageantry and mystery that once made it the sport of kings (now the sport of conglomerates and sheiks). 

The recognition and maintenance of this duality is to my mind the central achievement of Jaimy Gordon's Lord of Misrule. Her characters are down and desperate, but not despairing. Hope is kindled by the prospect of a big win, but the hope is on the level of a trailer home to call your own. Few of the characters seem to have any designs on leaving the track and even fewer of the horses possess anything like quality. Even the plot of the novel seems aimless and beside the point; scene and sentiment are as important as success. 

Ultimately it is Gordon's linguistic verdancy that imbues the near-squalor of low-stakes horse-racing with something like nobility. Her casual, unremarked on deployment of a by-gone lexicon resuscitates, however briefly, the possibility of the perfect horse and the transcendent race.

_____________________________________________________

Buy books mentioned in this post (or anything else, actually) using the below links, and The Reading Ape gets a small referral fee to defray our nominal operating costs.

Stieg Larsson, The New Yorker, and the "Good Enough" Theory of Culture

Is there a better entertainment than watching The New Yorker try to understand popular culture? It seems to be the last pocket of the universe that can't wrap its head around a de-coupling of aesthetic merit and commercial success.

This has never been more striking than in Joan Acocella's  recent attempt to account for the popularity of Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy, "Man of Mystery" (sub-heading: "Why do people love Stieg Larsson's novels?"). The piece serves as one-stop shopping for newcomers to the series, those who, presumably, have seen the books on subways and in airport bookstores but have little sense of what the fuss is about. The resulting discussion, I think, tells us more about Acocella's literary sensibilities than sheds the faintest photon on America's taste for these novels.

Her distaste for the series, its success, and perhaps even the story she is writing, suffuses her discussion, right from the first sentence:

"[h]aving got American readers to buy more than fourteen million copies, collectively, of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy books-“The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” (2008, American edition), “The Girl Who Played with Fire” (2009), and “The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest (2010)-the management at Knopf has decided that it would like them to buy some more." 

Let's ignore the stylistic clumsiness of "having got" and instead focus on her view of the matter. Readers haven't wanted to read these books; they have been "got" to buy them. That the content of the books should generate such interest befuddles Acocella, so she looks for forces other than readerly pleasure, up to and including the ability of publisher to manufacture a literary blockbuster. Her project seems to be to catalog her own problems with the series ("The loss of Larsson's style would not be a sacrifice, "the most crippling weakness of the trilogy is its hero," and "[l]ike many mediocre novels, the trilogy is far better on the screen than on the page" among other complaints) more than it is a think-piece on its wild success.

Even as she turns to her conjecture about the phenomenon, she can't help but couch it in condescension: "It is clear that people like these movies, but what accounts for the success of the novels, despite their almost comical faults?"

And what does "account" (notice the weird passivity of that verb) for this success? First, she does concede (not without a dig) that "Larsson may have had a weakness for extraneous detail, but at the same time, paradoxically, he is a very good storyteller." One might expect that this begrudged attribute might be supported by the same kinds of evidence she used to detail the awkwardness of some of the dialogue, but not one specific instance of this story-telling ability is offered.

This, unfortunately, is the high-water mark of her analysis. Acocella's subsequent reasons for the series' popularity are, in order: the popularity of the revenge genre, the supposedly widespread male sexual fantasy of rape, the rise of the "woman warrior," the inclusion of modern technology, and, I kid you not, Larsson's critique of Sweden's social democracy. I find this somewhat less than persuasive.

I suppose the logic for such grasping is something like this: if something is hugely shocking, then the causes of said event must be equally unlikely. Acocella starts from a point of finding Larsson's success confounding, so the contributing factors must be likewise abstruse.

After reading and enjoying the series, I don't find the success all that unexpected, so would take the opposite tack and assume the reasons are relatively familiar. Here's how I would parse the pieces:

Pre-Existing Popular Taste: 45%
This is crime/thriller fiction, arguably the most popular brand of adult literature. Grisham. Patterson. Ludlum. These dudes move trucks and trucks of books, and Larsson, himself a fan of the genre, is operating in this vein. I don't think Larsson is really any better of a writer than these guys, but I don't think he's any worse, at least in English translation, either.

Lisbeth Salander: 20%
This, however, is not a character we've seen much of. Acocella calls her a "punk-fairy": I would describe her more like a "techno she-devil." She is at once vulnerable and fiercely competent, with a serious nasty streak: equal parts Debbie Harry, Bill Gates, and The Punisher.

Setting: 10%
There is something oddly compelling about the atmosphere of Larsson's Sweden, especially in the first book. Its cold austerity has an almost monastic quality, which plays nicely against the twisted passions of the villains.

Packaging: 5%
I'm sure people who work in publishing would be able to describe this better, but the look and feel of the series captures a certain modern urbanity that separates them from your run of the mill gold-embossed trade paperback thriller. Look at GWTDT next to Patterson's latest.

I've seen that Patterson cover 974123469 times. I've never seen one quite like The Girl with a Dragon Tattoo. This matters.


Back-story: 5%
Larsson's biography and death are definitely fascinating. He came out of nowhere and stayed there. I don't discount this sort of thing; I've seen it too many times. Cobain. John Kennedy Toole. Sylvia Plath. That guy who wrote RENT. We can't get enough of a tragic and mysterious success. This could be higher than 5%, actually.

Chaos Theory: 10%
Sometimes, the ingredients bake up in just the right way at the right time—an inscrutable emergent property that is as palpable as it is unknowable. Maybe a tiredness with a popular genre created some room for a variation of it. Maybe everyone has a tattoo and a Mac now. Maybe we all hate flying so much that the page-turning immersion these books provide is especially welcome. Maybe it's all of these, maybe none. How else can you explain the popularity of Hypercolor t-shirts in the mid-1990s or the sudden rise of bacon? I mean, bacon's always been good.

All in all, I’m not sure there’s a great and powerful Oz behind this particular curtain.

One last comment: I think we might find a clue to Acocella incomprehension in the word choice of her sub-heading, “Why do people ‘love’ Stieg Larsson’s novels?” The thinking is that if a bunch of people buy something, then they must love it. My experience, and that of many of the people I know who have read the books, is not really one of love; it was one of “hey, pretty fun read. That made my flight 28% less painful.”

I read somewhere, though I can’t find it now, that the most rated movie among Netflix subscribers is Miss Congeniality: not challenging, a likable lead, familiar, and yet slightly different. Not going to piss too many people off, but also not likely to be named to anyone’s favorite movies of all time. That doesn’t make it bad or worthy of scorn—just hugely popular.
_______________________________________________________________________________

Buy books mentioned in this post (or anything else, actually) using the below links, and The Reading Ape gets a small referral fee to defray our nominal operating costs.

The Poor Will Be With Us Always

I saw Gilberto Alvarez almost every day, in summer heat and winter storm. I remember seeing him on my 30th birthday and on the first anniversary of September 11th. I knew something about him; he loved baseball, talking about the MTA, and dogs. Now that I think about it, I probably saw him more often than anyone except my girlfriend. And, until he died, I didn't know his name.

____________________

I suppose most of us have a Gilberto Alvarez in our lives, or perhaps I should say around our lives. Someone who is both oddly present and discomfiting. Someone who is off-putting because of some combination of station, appearance, and behavior. Someone on whom we spend more energy ignoring than acknowledging.

In Jon Clinch's strange and fascinating Kings of the Earth, these are the Proctor brothers: Creed, Vernon and Audie. The bizarre sons of hard and gnomish parents, the Proctors live, work, and sleep together on their scrub farm in central New York. They aren't charming misfits or wizened hermits waiting for someone to discover their hearts of gold. They are illiterate, ignorant, stubborn, and disquieting. Their connection to the world beyond the farm extends only to their sister, who somehow escaped the family, and one interested neighbor.

It should be said that this is not a story of rescue or redemption. Clinch isn't interested in making us feel better about these men, but he is interested in getting us to see them.

______________

I didn't go out of my way to see Gilberto, and I really don't know if he ever recognized me.

Still, there he was, every morning, outside the subway station. I never saw him arrive or leave, and, judging by the state of his wheelchair, he either didn't go far or had someone help him to wherever he spent nights. Some days his prosthetic leg was with him, some days it wasn't, but I never did see him wearing it. It might be propped up next to wheelchair or laying on one the stairs down to the platform. I once saw him use it as a kind of scepter, waving it emphatically to underscore his more passionate points about the Mets’ lack of pitching.

_______________

Clinch gives us some insight to how the brothers ended up this way, a disquietingly believable combination of poverty, distrust, and pathology. We end up feeling about the Proctors in much the same way as the people around them do—a little curious but mostly repulsed. And the local farmers and businesspeople leave them well enough alone until the middle brother, Vernon, dies in his sleep. The mystery of his death supplies what little plot there is here, but Kings of the Earth isn't a story of these men so much as it is a mediation on difference: not the discourse of diversity or of multiculturalism or of a "rainbow society" but of the difference that makes us scurry past someone or avert our eyes. 

_______________

Over the nine or so years I walked past Gilberto's change cup, I probably gave him less than three dollars.  I'm not even so sure he was really there for the money, though I know he needed it. More than anything, he watched and waited for the few people who would spend a minute talking to him. From what I can tell, most of these were living rough like him, though with varying degrees of wear, and I don't have any idea what they talked about. I try to imagine their conversations now, but I don't come up with much and can only guess at the kinds of things that occupied their minds.

_______________

In the end, Clinch doesn't ask us to like or understand the Proctors. Truth be told, I'm not entirely sure what our attitude toward them is supposed to be. I think most readers will feel sympathy for them, especially Audie, but it's a qualified and awkward sympathy. Even after getting to know them, we wouldn't want to spend time with them. Does that make us callous? Would our better angels have us play cards with them on cold February nights or invite them to our summer barbecues? I doubt it. As we see the Proctor brothers through the eyes of those around them, we don't just see the brothers, we see they way they are seen; they are misunderstood, caricatured, ignored, exploited, and underestimated, and so our own misunderstanding, ignorance, exploitation is cast into the open. 

________________

One morning a couple of months ago, Gilberto and his wheelchair were missing. Instead, there was a piece of white paper taped to a light pole that read "Gilberto Alvarez, ????-2010" and a plastic tray full of sandwiches on the sidewalk. A couple of men were standing there, talking and eating the sandwiches. It took me a minute to realize that someone had brought them to mark Gilberto's presence and passing.

I don't know if I should have tried talking to Gilberto or gave him a few quarters every couple of weeks. I'm not naive enough to think everyone can be saved, but I'm not so callous that I want to ignore them. And perhaps that's what Kings of the Earth offered me: a way of seeing Gilberto and not flinching, of acknowledging his existence and his death without sentimentalizing or marginalizing him. He was here, and he was one of us. That's not the best I can do, but it's all I can do now. 

  

The Four Fingers of Death by Rick Moody

Reading Rick Moody's The Four Fingers of Death is somewhat like getting a ticket to DisneyWorld, then being told you must go on every ride, eat every kind of food, and see every show. On a Saturday. In August.

On such a visit, you will spend a lot of time waiting. Waiting while hot, tired, and subject to screaming children, and frazzled parents. You will remark on how crowded it is, how it is both an amazing and revolting place, how it can be strange, terrible, and sublime. How you're not sure if you'd go back, but you're oddly glad that you experienced it.

For The Four Fingers of Death, like DisneyWorld, is over-stuffed, indulgent, boring, dizzying, entertaining, and exaperating by turn. If only it just wasn't so long. Or maybe if the last 250 pages were different. Or if you had any sort of reasonable belief that it all adds up to anything. Or maybe if there was slightly less mechanized sex or perhaps fewer sentient chimpanzees with Napoleon complexes. Like maybe zero sentient chimpanzees with Napoleon complexes.

But then there are moments where you forget the stench and noise and simply marvel at what's possible.

Also like at Disneyworld, the artificiality is part of the fun here. Most of The Four Fingers of Death is the 2025 novelization of a fictional 1960s B-movie, The Crawling Hand. The author of this novelization, Montrese Crandall, took the ob after winning a bet over a chess match with a mysterious baseball card fanatic; trust me, this was the most coherent part of the story.

This frame, of Crandall's artistic frustration, romantic loneliness, and unfulfilled ambition, provides Moody with the opportunity, in the main part of the work, to experiment, to indulge, and to create some of the more amazing set pieces you are likely to read, along with passages that are repetitive, inscrutable, and virtually unreadable.

The "plot" of the novel-within-the-novel is at once irrelevant and crucial. The actual story of a disastrous Mars mission that culminates in the introduction of a rampaging, diseased appendage (the titular "four fingers" are the remaining digits on the hand of one of the Mars astronauts) is not terribly engaging, but it gives Moody such a range of locations, cirumstances, characters, and ideas that it's hard to imagine any other story containing his perambulations.

The central experience of reading The Four Fingers of Death is to be amazed and aggravated in extreme proximity. For example, Moody gives entertaining, psychedelic passages like this:

Silence is a thing onto which meanings can be projected. In silence you might believe, with the proper balance of chemical reagents, that a radical depopulating of the desert landscape is called for, in which the white man and all of his ways, his preposterous medical clinics with their radiological devices, and his steroid-enhanced, lacrosse-playing ubermen, should be deforested, by whatever means there was for deforesting the whiteman.

Elsewhere, his inventions fail, and they fail in extended, spectacular fashion:

He couldn't feel one fucking thing in his leg, not one fucking thing; his leg felt like it wasn't even his own fucking leg, and when he looked down at the leg, or at the other leg, at the pair of legs, it was like they were not legs at all, like they were fucking lengths of PVC pipes or something. (This continues for another six pages.)

There are substantial chunks of gold here, but it requires a sturdy back to sift through all the slag. It is likely that only the intrepid will find the odyssey worthwhile, as The Four Fingers of Death brings Longfellow's "girl with the curl" to mind:

There was a little girl, who had a little curl

Right in the middle of her forehead,

And when she was good, she was very, very good,

But when she was bad she was horrid.

Weiner Picoult v. The World

After a late summer vacation and the beginning of fall classes, the Ape gets back into the blogging-swing. Coming up at The Reading Ape: reviews of Franzen’s Freedom, Moody’s The Four Fingers of Death, a reading disease self-diagnosis, and further considerations of reading and the gender gap.

But up first, we pause a moment to reflect on the Weiner-Picoult v. The New York Times whirlwind that kicked up over the last couple of weeks.  Jason Pinter’s interview with the duo for The Huffington Post provides an abundance of mill-grist, so let’s take a look (Ape note: we have never read a work by either Picoult or Weiner.).

1. I am shocked, SHOCKED, to discover there is gambling in this establishment!

Jennifer Weiner: I think it's a very old and deep-seated double standard that holds that when a man writes about family and feelings, it's literature with a capital L, but when a woman considers the same topics, it's romance, or a beach book - in short, it's something unworthy of a serious critic's attention.

Takeaway:  Unfortunately, Weiner’s basic point is correct: female writers have not received the same sort of attention that male writers have. So it’s not the sentiment that is particularly interesting here, but the timing (after all, Woolf covered this all 80 years ago in A Room of One’s Own). There seems to be something specifically galling about the Franzen hoopla for Weiner (let’s put a pin in the phrase “serious critic’s attention” for future use).

2. Sometimes the Answer is in the Question

Picoult: …When in today's market you only have a limited review space for books, I wonder what the rationale is for the New York Times to review the same book twice, sometimes in the same week.

Takeaway: The people who write about books for The Times want to write about books they think are important, not giving the widest possible coverage. The narrowing of the focus necessarily increases the wattage given to certain books, and multiple reviews of high profile books tempers the clout of any individual review with multiple perspectives. 

3. The Medium is the Message

Picoult:… I read a lot of commercial fiction and a lot of the same themes and wisdoms I find in commercial fiction are the same themes and wisdoms as what i see lauded in literary fiction.

Takeaway: One thing that the both Picoult and Weiner seem to overlook is the primacy of form in “serious criticism.” Perhaps Picoult is right that the themes and wisdoms are similar, but presumably the style and shape of those themes and wisdoms are not. The mass market appeal of a Picoult novel (or for that matter a Larsson or Grisham) due to “readability” suggests an artlessness that doesn’t appeal to people who spend their lives thinking about literature. 

4. Careful, your Ad Hominem is Showing

Weiner: First of all, I think it's hilarious that a guy who went to Sidwell Friends, Yale and Johns Hopkins, favors "made-to-measure Lord Willys shirts," snacks on charcuterie, sips Calvados and throws book parties at "the velvet-cloaked Russian Samovar" is presuming to lecture anyone on what constitutes true populism. Let the word go forth: my populism is real...and it's spectacular. 

Takeaway: This is not a takeaway so much as it is context: both Weinder and Picoult went to Princeton. 

5. The Flattening of Culture

Weiner: How can anyone claim the paper plays fair when genre fiction that men read gets reviewed but genre fiction that women read doesn't exist on the paper's review pages? It would be as if the paper's film critics only reviewed tiny independent fare and refused to see so much as a single frame of a romantic comedy, or if the music critics listened to Grizzly Bear and refused to acknowledge the existence of Katy Perry or Lady Gaga. How seriously would a reader take a critic like that?

Takeaway: Weiner suggests that a literary critic should have the same breadth as a critic of music or film, but as any serious reader knows, literature, as a genre, resists that sort of coverage. A film reviewer could reasonably see all the new releases in any given week; this is simply impossible for even the most active book reviewer. Couple that with the relative depth of serious book reviews and you start to see why the reviews in The Times can seem more arbitrary than its film or music reviews. 

6. Yea, But See, They Don’t Care About That.

Weiner: I think if the NYT cares about its darlings finding a wider audience, the smartest thing it can do is be a little more respectful toward the books readers are actually reading.

Takeaway: It’s not at all clear that this is the mission of the NY Times. In fact, we sincerely hope it isn’t. If the goal of The Times was to give attention to the books people were actually reading, we’d have mostly Twilight, Clive Cussler, and Sophie Kinsella reviews. And the food writing would be about Doritos. 

Criticism is the last line of a winnowing process that starts with agents, moves to publishers, then to booksellers and critics. Whatever cache the Times Review still has is because there is a level of discernment implied in what it reviews. Take away that discernment and the prestige evaporates. We’re not suggesting that the Times doesn’t require self-reflection (what doesn’t after all?), but that asking them to map popularity is counter-productive. 

7. I Still Don’t Get It

Weiner: I think a most respectful and informed attitude toward a wider range of books would help everyone - commercial writers, literary writers, men, women, and, most importantly, readers.

Takeaway: Weiner and Picoult, by their own admission, make a jillion dollars from their books and their readers adore them. What “help” do they need exactly? We wish they would just pull a full Fredo and say it: “I want respect and I was passed over!” We can understand this feeling and do indeed sympathize with it.

There is a case to be made, we think, that most readers feel estranged from literary writing; it is difficult, provocative, and sometimes experimental. It is, in a very real way, artistically elitist. And it’s these types of books that The Times highlights. Weiner and Picoult might be spot on when they say their books are similar enough to Hornby or Tropper to warrant inclusion: we are not familiar enough to say. 

If the Ape is honest with his primate-self, though, our attitude about the discernment of “serious critics” echoes the sentiment of Colonel Nathan Jessop in Aaron Sorkin’s A Few Good Men: I want them on that wall. I need them on that wall.

          But perhaps those of us who care about such things need to do a better job watching the watchers.

A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

While short stories are one of the oldest fictional genres (if not the oldest), "linked" short stories are among the newest. And it's a bit of a strange genre at that--it possesses neither the depth and development of the novel nor the staccato burst of the short story.

It depends instead, somewhat paradoxically, on omission and inclusion. Characters re-appear at different stages in their lives and in different roles, but the spaces between these appearances are left blank. Often it's difficult to find the strain that connects linked short stories beyond similar people or locations. One might argue that linked short stories best represent our lives as we live them; our lives tend not to have the grand narrative arcs of novels or the disparate, concentrated moments of meaning and action of short stories. It is a genre that balances connection and ambiguity.

As such, it is a genre that can be both beguiling and frustrating by turn. The relationships between the linked stories are often as overt as they are elusive. What does it mean exactly if the main character in one story appears as a bystander in a later story? How are we to connect the threads we see, even as the author creates spaces and questions between them?

Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad embodies much that is interesting and confounding about linked short stories. Like many such collections, the central figures of A Visit from the Goon Squad are not people, but ideas--in this case time, memory, maturation, music and technology.

Egan shows us the effect of these forces on a handful of recurring characters, even as she keeps them at arm's length. For example, the collection starts with a blind date between Sasha and Alex, a young couple living in New York City in what appears to be the present day. Sasha, an assistant to record-executive Bennie Salazar, is a kleptomaniac who is probably the most fully formed character in the work; we see her as an adolescent, as a lost woman-child in Europe, and finally as a reasonably well-adjusted mother of two in a not-too-distant future America. And yet, we don't get to know her. We watch her and follow her, track her and recognize her, but Egan keeps her at a distance. The effect is rather more cinematic than fictional; like a movie character, Sasha's interiority is largely inaccessible, even as we have her square in our sights.

This is one consequence of linked stories; we are not given much insight into cause and effect. Sasha is a kleptomanic at the start and appears not be in the end. What was the source of her compulsion? How did it resolve itself? These questions are left open, even as we know somewhere there are answers.
These narrative particularities aside, A Visit from the Good Squad does contain two especially striking stories, both of which could stand on their own in a more traditional story collection. The most formally innovative "story" in the collection is actually a PowerPoint presentation called "Rock and Roll Pauses by Alison Blake." The presentation is a notebook-cum-diary of a young girl in PowerPoint form. The graphs, flowcharts, tables, and bullet-lists represent Alison's attempt to figure her family out, from her Dad's startling disquient to her probably-autistic brother's obsession with pauses in rock music.

Alison'r project, and that of her brother, share some of the larger questions of the collection: How do you understand people who don't understand themselves? How do you deal with incomplete or ambiguous information? How do you construct the story of your life out of the thing strands of your experience?
Egan's final story, "Pure Language," takes these same questions and turns them upside down. In it, 30-something husband and father Alex (who appears on the blind date in the first story) participates in an elaborate technology-driven promotion for an outdoor concert in lower Manhattan. Essentially, the sceme is viral-promotion masquerading as "authentic" word of mouth: using social networking, well-placed text messages to influential friends, and subliminal messages, Alex and the rest of the concert promoters "manufacture" desire among parents and children to go see a show by a fading rock musician. Or rather, they manufacture the perception that the concert will fill a latent desire for connection, collectivity, and transcendence in this particular population.

These twin stories suggest that Egan sees a choice before us. Either we learn to deal with the incompleteness and ambiguity of our lives or we we look for some kind of resolution, even if that means looking to artificial, packaged solutions to what ails us.

Saying things are "Overrated" is "Overrated"

After reading Anis Shivani's 15 Most Overrated Contemporary American Writers, I was tempted both to attack his critical suppositions (“If we don't understand bad writing, we can't understand good writing” and “As for conglomerate publishing, the decision-makers wouldn't know great literature if it hit them in the face” among other howlers) and defend those among his choices whom I admire (Lahiri, Diaz, Ashberry, among others.) From there I most assuredly would have debased myself by exposing his inability to use subordinating conjunctions correctly  and to construct a parallel list. Ahem.

This would have been both futile and, well, unpleasant. There's really no arguing opinion, and his diatribe, as much as it might be framed as the pleading of the last honest man in show business, is just opinion. So, any attempt to rebut his flame-throwing would have required equally incendiary tactics: questioning taste, undercutting authority, needling intention, and calling out integrity.

What's interesting to me now is the idea of something being properly “rated.” Presumably Shivani doesn't think Sharon Olds should be tarred and feathered; it's just that her acclaim and success does not seem to him commensurate with her ability. At its core, labeling something under- or  over-rated is a call for justice, for an equivalence of achievement to acknowledgment.

Of and in itself this is not a bad motive, as it would theoretically strip some of their excess “rating” and re-assign it to those who don't enjoy a “rating” their work deserves. The problem with this, as I see it at least, is that it requires an arbiter, a critic-king to redistribute the literary laurels appropriately. And no such being exists. Shivani bemoans the lack of a contemporary taste-maker who might restore order (hence the mentions of Malcolm Cowley and Alfred Kazin), but in doing so ,he uncritically re-asserts the idea that there is some objective measure of quality. His argument is that there is some definable characteristics of good writing; it's just that we don't have anyone who is either willing or able to do the measuring.

This is, of course, silly.

The ideological forces that brought down literary taste-making are the same that have opened our collective eyes to the fallacy of objective worth. What remains is discourse—the argument between you and I over who should be read and who shouldn't. That discussion can be immensely interesting, satisfying, provocative, and enjoyable (it is the reason I do what I do for a living.). However, each participant must first acknowledge the rules of the game: that your opinion is only valid insofar as you acknowledge it to be your opinion, that the goal of the discussion is revel in the possibility of art and of each other. We should champion those writers we cherish, but this doesn't require us to besmirch the darlings of others. Such behavior does not become us and can only serve to muddy the already tempestuous waters of contemporary literature.

The desire to rate is the desire to organize and understand the world; if we know something's rating, then we can use that knowledge to maximize our happiness. If Faulkner is 9.0 and O'Connor is an 8.8, then I should make sure I read Faulkner before I get to O'Connor. But as we all know, this doesn't generally work, especially in literature. My 9.0 says as much about me as it says about Faulkner or O'Connor or Melville or Stephanie Meyer, much as Shivani's slash-and-burn approach to opinions that aren't his says more about him than it does the writers he belittles.

Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart

We're finding it difficult to process Gary Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story, so consider the below not so much a review as post-view, an attempt to get some sort of handle on an unruly text.

____________________________________

Though Lenny Abramov, the protagonist of Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story, reads War and Peace lovingly and obsessively, he does not read it well (more on this later). Shteyngart, however, clearly has, and the presence of Tolstoy’s masterwork in the novel is no accident (nor is the brief mention of 1984).

Like War and Peace, Super Sad Love Story takes place during the waning of an Empire in a dystopian near-future New York City where characters scramble to make sense of what is happening and find a place for themselves in the new world order. Here the Napoleonic Wars are replaced with the skirmishes of international capitalism; America’s economic weakness is being exploited by international conglomerates disguised as nations. State-sponsored capitalism is clearly the boogeyman here, particularly Abramov’s employer Staatling-Wapachung, a Sino-European corporate griffin poised to profit from a financial coup de grace in toppling the good ol’ U.S. of A.

Against this backdrop, Super Sad True Love Story follows Lenny as he tries to get the girl---a beautiful, vapid second generation Korean immigrant who is attracted to Lenny initially only for his salary (more than “239,000 yuan-pegged dollars a year”).

A late 30s schlub working for a “life extension” company, Lenny reads Tolstoy obsessively and furtively, for in this New New York, printed books are embarrassing relics, read only by the tragically uncool.  If going “viral” is our metaphor for digital popularity, social networking here has gone positively bubonic. People are continuously and addictively tuned into their “apparat”, smartphone-like devices that track the information of those immediately around them. Its killer-app (and model name) is RateMe: a steroidal Facebook/Twitter amalgam that gives users access to each other’s age, weight, personal and financial history, and a constantly update desirability index, rating a “personality” and “fuckability” on an 800-point scale. (It is an information orgy that spills over into consumer products: women’s clothing comes from two primary companies: AssLuxury and TotalSurrender.)

The Lenny-Eunice union is draped over a digital divide: his old world romanticism strains against her immersion in the electron-crazed zeitgeist—a tension exhibited in the structure of the novel itself, which shifts between his handwritten diary entries and transcripts of her email and online chats.

Readers might be tempted, being readers, to side with the bookish and old-fashioned Lenny, though I think his War and Peace fetish is a signal from Shteyngart to be wary. Lenny’s belief in his own agency (he stresses on the first page that his mission is to be immortal) becomes comic as the larger forces of culture and history crash on the rocks around him; no amount of Enlightenment thinking is going to provide him a harbor in this storm. For as much as digital narcissisim and global capitalism are the overt targets of Shteyngart’s satire, it is the paradox of information that I find the most fascinating.

The more information Lenny, Eunice, and the rest of the characters accumulate, the more their helplessness and limitation are laid bare. Does it do Lenny any good to know that he is generally regarded as one of the least attractive man in the room? Or does Eunice profit from watching her fuckability score oscillate depending on the cut of her clothes? Of course not. All this self-voyeurism only distracts from the ineluctable forces, both private and public, that shape their lives. For all of her beauty and youth, Eunice cannot escape the shadow of her father’s abuse. For all of Lenny’s self-inspection and optimism, he, like everyone else, is flawed and mortal. Their desire to enumerate their being is a desire for control: of their image, of their fortunes, and of their lives.

As it so happens, Tolstoy’s second epilogue to War and Peace might be thought of as a primer for understanding the worldview of Super Sad True Love Story, all of its own distractions and inventions notwithstanding:

[I]t now seems as if we have only to admit the law of inevitability, to destroy the conception of the soul, of good and evil, and all the institutions of state and church that have been built up on those conceptions…it is similarly necessary to renounce a freedom that does not exist, and to recognize a dependence of which we are not conscious.

Somewhat dizzingly, what is articulated here is a call to be-aware of our self-deception, to transcend solipsism not by asserting our ego, but by acknowledging our limitation and fallenness.

Those whose interests align with a resistance to technology (ie most writers and reviewers) will probably praise Shteyngart’s critique of the digital age. Those who see themselves at the vanguard of contemporary culture will probably accuse him of literary grumpsterism. They might both be right, but I suspect they would both be wrong. The object of terror here is neither the medium nor the message; it is the clear-eyed awareness of what we cannot do.

Review Policy --- DRAFT

Dear readers and fellow book bloggers,

The Ape has been putting off crafting a review policy, but a recent mini-spike in inquiries has at last forced our hand. Below is our attempt at a reasonable policy, and we'd be enormously appreciative of any feedback you might have the time to offer. Have we left something out? Said something, in Orwell's words, "avoidably barbaric?" Let us know in the comments, on Twitter, or by email.
                                                       ---Thanks in advance, TRA
______________________________

The Ape is open to receiving review copies from publishers, agents, and authors.  However, we only make time for literary fiction and literary history, so unless your book could reasonably be shelved in either category, we’re probably not a good fit for you.

Also, we make no promises about giving the book a review, let alone a positive one.  We’re committed to giving any accepted book a fair chance, but our reading time is too dear to us to promise more.  Unfortunately, we’re not currently equipped to accept e-books or other digital formats.

We’re also not interested, for the time being, in blog tours, author interviews, guest posts, or giveaways, but this state of affairs is subject to change.

If, after all this, you’d like to discuss submitting your book or would like to know more about our readership, please do email us at readingape (at) gmail.com.

Cheers,

The Reading Ape

The Best Novels of 2010....so far...

Like a keg at a frat party, it seems like we just tapped 2010, but now it is already half-finished.  Lest we find ourselves face down in the yard, wondering what the heck happened last year, The Ape offers the three best novels from the first six months. (Note: these are books published in 2010)

In ascending order:

3. The Ask by Sam Lipsyte

Comic novels rarely enjoy much award-love (Take a look at the past winners of the major book awards; you’ll find more laughs at a burn unit), but Lipsyte’s inventive, caustic, and down-right funny The Ask should be on your radar. Milo Burke, Lipsyte’s protagonist, is the worst kind of mediocrity—the kind that not-so-secretly believes they are destined for some ill-defined greatness. Struggling along at this job as a fund-raiser for a pretentious, mid-level university in New York City (this is starting to hit a wee close to home), Burke has disdain for the wealthy donors he must woo, contempt for comfortable liberalism of his friends, and a one-liner for everything. One to scratch your misanthropy itch, by way of your funny bone.

2. The Invisible Bridge by Julie Orringer

From our review:

Like many Holocaust stories, this one is harrowing, but the time Orringer spent establishing these characters and these stories in the first half of the book deepens our investment; the dreadful cost is brought home all the more powerfully because The Invisible Bridge shows us a time before the fall. Orringer's great achievement here is to give us the Holocaust anew, to remind us of the scale of what was lost and to cherish what survived.

The Invisible Bridge is a two-fer: the first half about a young man going to school in Paris, getting into trouble, and falling in love. (It’s the “We’ll always have Paris” backstory from Casablanca, if Bogie were Hungarian and Bergman older and had killed a cop.) The second half leverages our emotional investment from this deep grounding, as the Nazis, and their allies, round-up and exterminate Eastern Europe’s Jews. This is an engrossing read that has lingered in our minds, even as our raging bibliophilia has marched on.

1.  Matterhorn by Karl Marlantes

We’re not alone in our admiration for Marlantes’ steady, enveloping novel of the Vietnam War, and it is sure to be in the mix for all of the major American literary awards. From our review:

Marlantes [is] unrelenting in his account of the Vietnam War's operational and political confusion; he doesn't spare us the arcana of a Marine officer's life, knowing full well, as one of the characters says, that the truth is not found, but assembled:

"Intelligence, Lieutenant," Simpson went on, "is built up by the fastidious collection of minutiae. You understand that, don't you? It isn't the result of spectacular finds. It's the result of hard work, constant attention to detail--to minutiae. Mi-nu-tiae."

And though Marlantes tries to guide us through the minutiae with a chart of the chain of command, a detailed map of the operation, and a lengthy glossary of military terminology, the deluge of call signs, equipment, procedures, ranks, titles, and tactics is beyond comprehension. And once Mellas [the novel’s protagonist] realizes (the reader alongside) that these particulars are not in themselves meaningful, but the minutiae out of which meaning is made, he comes to be himself at last.

Like The Invisible Bridge, Matterhorn re-visits familiar territory, but, and this is the sign of great writing, forces to reconsider what we thought we knew.

__________________________________________

So, there you go—the leaders in the clubhouse for 2010. Several marquee releases await (seriously, just release the new Franzen already), but someone's going to have to bring some serious heat to top Matterhorn.
__________________________________________

Buy books mentioned in this post (or anything else, actually) using the below links, and The Reading Ape gets a small referral fee to defray our nominal operating costs.

The Special Disappointment of a Failed Conceit

When does a conceit become gimmicky? Or when does a gimmick rise to the level of a conceit? I’ve been thinking about this for the last few days, trying to formulate something more substantial than “I know it when I see it.” It’s not going particularly well.

I’d never really thought about this distinction before reading Aimee Bender’s The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake. Usually, a gimmick announces itself loudly and plainly: stuffed crust pizza, a special holder in the dashboard for flowers, every storyline with “amnesia,” television shows with judges.  Hooks like these are supposed to get you in the door, but they aren’t the show itself; they are the amuse-bouches of modern commerce, the sizzle that sells the steak.

But conceits are different. Conceits look like gimmicks. Probably some people think that competitive cooking is the conceit of Iron Chef, though it’s just a gimmick, like bearded ladies or everything David Blaine does. The goal of a gimmick is differentiation, but the goal of a conceit is something deeper.
In fact, conceits are as old as the novel itself. In the Decameron, Boccaccio imagines 10 young courtesans fleeing plague-ravaged Florence for the countryside, telling rowdy and ribald stories along the way.  Cervantes came up with perhaps the best conceit ever-the simple, almost believable idea that an obsessive reader of medieval romances might come under the belief that he himself is a knight-errant. Like fiction itself, a good conceit uses the unreal to uncover and examine something about the real. Don Quixote’s delusion disjoints him from the society of his day, and the way characters react to him forms the center of Cervantes’ commentary on Spanish morality. (Alan Moore’s Watchmen is one of the better contemporary analogues; his proposition that superheroes are “real” allows him to explore power and control in ways both unexpected and fascinating.)

So perhaps this higher-calling of the literary conceit is the reason that Bender’s latest novel was such a disappointment. The conceit (we’ll go with term  for a minute) is pretty clever, and when I’ve told people about it, the universal response has been “That sounds kinda cool.” So here it is. On her ninth birthday, Rose Edelstein discovers, while eating a birthday cake made for her by her mother, that she can taste the feelings of others.  Not bad, right? (Have you noticed that nine out of ten cooks interviewed on the Food Network say that “love” makes their food special? How can “love” make it special if everyone says that? I want someone to say “Actually, it’s a gripping fear of death that makes my hamburgers so moist.”)

Indeed it’s a good hook, and Rose’s realization, detected somewhere between the butter and sugar of the cake, that her mother is fundamentally unhappy with her life jolts Rose into a premature adulthood (I’m assuming, for the moment, that being an adult corresponds with recognizing that other people have, you know, feelings). This happens in the first dozen or so pages of the novel, leaving the 250 or so remaining pages for Bender to explore the ramifications of this little skill/curse. But….nothing much happens.

Rose goes to school. She tries, unsuccessfully, to make friends. She avoids eating food made by people she knows, and when possible eats mass-produced food as it has the bare minimum of human emotion in it. She gets interested in cooking. And that’s pretty much it. About one hundred pages in, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake is like many other earnest, well-meaning coming-of-age novels. No worse, but not a whole lot better.

And it’s really quite disappointing. Bender writes well and Rose is the kind of lonely, likable (though perhaps by now overly familiar) child protagonist that readers tend to cheer for. But there is a missed, and I’m tempted to say wasted , opportunity for Bender to chart the hiddenness of our daily lives. It is a strange choice to give Rose this ability and then spend the novel having her avoid it. Indeed, the reader is likely to feel much the same hollowness in the novel that Rose detects in her mother:

None of it was a bad taste, so much, but there was a kind of lack of wholeness to the flavors that made it taste hollow, like the lemon and chocolate were just surrounding a hollowness. My mother’s able hands had made the cake, and her mind had known how to balance the ingredients, but she was not there, in it.

Imperial Bedrooms by Bret Easton Ellis: A Review-A-Long

Last week, Bret Easton Ellis’s Imperial Bedrooms, a sequel to his stunning 1985 debut Less Than Zero, arrived with no small degree of anticipation. Ellis has been a controversial writer ever since Less than Zero, and the mesmerizing mixture of shock and yawn that characterized that book does reappear in Imperial Bedrooms, but with far less effect. Imperial Bedrooms has not to this point been warmly and, rather than just throw another log onto the fire, we thought we’d do another little review-a-long, this time with Janet Maslin. (Bold text is from her review in the New York Times; italicized text is my response).

Let’s do this:

Whatever its genesis, what this vacant new book does best is demonstrate that there are more ways to be bored and boring in Los Angeles in 2010 than there were in 1985.

Maslin’s dead on here. We get extended descriptions of text-message conversations, marathon YouTube viewing sessions, and repeat visits to high-end retailers and restaurants. There’s a whole lot of nothing masquerading as something here. This was executed to scathing effect in Less than Zero because it was a fresh, contemporary critique by a contemporary. Imperial Bedrooms doesn’t say anything new, and, like the characters in it, masks banality, and eventually malice, with a veneer of techno-sophistication.

As “Imperial Bedrooms” begins, [Clay] is whinging that “someone we knew” wrote an unflattering book about Clay and his friends, and that the book was made into a movie[…]“Imperial Bedrooms” barely has time to set up this hall-of-mirrors conceit before abandoning it.

The ill-considered inclusion of a fiction-world version of Less than Zero feels like an idea born out of drunken bull-session. (“Wouldn’t it be cool if the characters in the new book were also characters in a book? That would be cra-zy.”) Perhaps to his credit, Ellis abandons the thread in the first few pages, but this only adds to the slap-dash feel of the novel. One of Less than Zero’s accomplishments was its remarkable pacing; it was a slow build, a transfixing crescendo from innocence to depravity. No such restraint exists in Imperial Bedrooms, as Ellis seems unable to maintain his prior focus.

It’s typical of Mr. Ellis to write a very long descriptive sentence about the soft beiges and recessed lighting and white-tiled balcony of the place while making only passing, casual reference to the party boy’s death. It’s also very like him to make the apartment a backdrop for casual cruelty.

“Casual cruelty” captures a feature of both novels beautifully, though Maslin seems to be dismissing it as some sort of ethical mis-step. Whatever the faults of Imperial Bedrooms, it does continue the moral flattening begun in Less than Zero. In a world where surface and sensation reign, pain and pleasure are equals, as are aesthetics and atrocities.  Representing cruelty casually gives the reader the sensation of amorality that seems to both fascinate and repel the reader and Clay himself. 

 […]there’s an element of real malaise in “Imperial Bedrooms.” The anomie and plot-derived menace may be contrived, but there’s a dread that feels genuine — and not because the book actually includes the line, “Sadness: it’s everywhere.” It’s the sense that options have narrowed for Mr. Ellis, whose most polarizing (“American Psycho”) or wild-eyed books (“Lunar Park”) have turned out to be his most vital ones.

By the end of the novel, I was thinking along these lines as well. Less than Zero’s ethical nullity pre-empted the need for any further exposition of it; once you’ve showed us the void, what else is there to do? This has been a literary puzzle, from Hamlet’s “there’s nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so” to Joyce’s empty chalice, for some time. While Hamlet and Joyce turned to art to create meaning, to fill the abyss, Ellis seems stuck on gazing into the blackness--as Maslin suggests—a terrifyingly bleak beige. 

I Curse the River of Time by Per Petterson

To be a citizen of Per Petterson's Norway is to be a stranger to yourself; your nine-year-old self walks shoulder-to-shoulder with your 37-year-old self, who in turn remembers what it was to be 22. As a result, the eternal question of "Who am I?" is doubled, folded, and refracted into "Which I exactly am I?"

Petterson's 2003 breakout novel Out Stealing Horses is relatively straightforward. At age 67 Trond Sander, retired and living in a sparsely populated corner of the country, is trying to come to terms with a childhood trauma that has haunted him for more than five decades. The persistence of that event in Sander's life (and the trouble it causes him) seeps into the water, dirt, trees, and air around him; the muted colors and winter barrenness of the landscape become the stage for his memory play. His daughter Ellen has no such access. She visits him and tries to understand what it is that has driven him back into himself.

Petterson's masterly new novel, I Curse the River of Time, might be thought of as a sort of companion piece. Not only does it reside at the same juncture of identity, memory, and time, but it also mirrors Out Stealing Horses's narrative structure. This time, however, a child's confusion with a parent's distance is the center of the story.

Three major parts of Arvid Jansen's life are drawing to a close. His marriage is ending. The Berlin wall is coming down, along with the left-wing idealism of his youth. And his mother is dying. The failure of this triad has sent him into an existential tailspin, and he is left wondering how his life ended up in such tatters. What Arvid doesn't see, but that Petterson allows us to see, is that Arvid is not, to borrow from the opening sentence of David Copperfield, the hero of his own life.

No, I Curse the River of Time, is the story of how one tragedy in his mother's life echoed across Arvid's. Though perhaps, given the novel's title, derived from a poem by Mao, "echoing" is the wrong metaphor. The river-as-time construction does to a degree capture the particular causality of Arvid's life — because of cataracts upstream, he is subject to turbulence beyond his control or ken. In turn, his own daughters' lives will be shaped by how he deals with his estrangement from his mother.

If we live long enough, it seems we will all eventually find ourselves in Arvid's position, struggling to understand how things for which we so ardently hoped have collapsed and why people so important to us have left. How will we deal with that realization? How will we, if we can, come to terms with our insufficiency and not be crushed by it?

Petterson's great gift to us here is to show us the cost of this kind of despair. Arvid thinks that he has some "flaw, some crack in the foundation of his character" that has caused him to be something other than what he had hoped, but it is only his mourning for an idea of himself that prevents him from living in full:

"Now comes what you have always feared, and you suddenly realise that every chance of being the person you really wanted to be is gone forever, and the one you were, is the one that those around you will remember. Then that must feel like someone's strong hands slowly tightening their grip around your neck until you can breathe no more." 

Some are foolish enough to claim they have no regrets, but most of us know that is delusion. Petterson challenges us to acknowledge both our frailty and our folly while not flinching at them, to value not what we had hoped for, but what we have saved.
____________________________________________
This review references an advance copy; the final published version may have minor changes.

I Curse the River of Time will be available starting August 3, 2010.

This article first published as Book Review: I Curse the River of Time by Per Petterson on Blogcritics.