Apr

11

Fiction and Nonfiction

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While work has really been going this week, I’ve still been able to cram a good amount of reading in (mostly while I’m at work waiting for stuff).  Two days of proctoring exams turns out to be exactly enough time to read City of Refuge by Tom Piazza.  Seriously, I finished two minutes before I called time on the last section.  Those of you who are familiar with how much I hate being interrupted when a book is almost almost over will know how happy this made me.

City of Refuge was the one book I was talked into reading by the Tournament.  It didn’t win, but lots of people said lots of things about it that made me curious.  In the end, I agree with most other opinions.  The book has an emotional core to it that is undeniable.  I really appreciate Piazza’s efforts to include characters of different classes and races in his story, something that I feel we don’t get enough of in literature these days.  White people write about white people, blacks write about blacks, the plethora of Indian authors write almost solely about Indians.

The major complaint I’ve seen about the book is its mixing of fiction and nonfiction, with the author’s need to include a litany of facts about Hurricane Katrina on the whole.  To some extent, I find this criticism misplaced.  Since when is this kind of writing a problem?  Hugo has pages upon pages of unnecessary nonfiction in Les Miserables, but I don’t see anyone complaining about that.  (Except perhaps myself.)  But I do agree that there are times when it is more successful and times when it doesn’t really work.  I stand behind the tactic in general, I think the size and scope of the crisis is such that an outside, omniscient perspective helps to tell the story.  But in some places it did seem to pull out of the characters into a completely different piece of writing.  I liked it better when Piazza stayed closer to his characters and just zoomed out to see the surroundings they may not be aware of.

My personal issue with the book was one of the main characters, Craig, who represents love for New Orleans.  In fact, that was my problem.  This seemed to be his only characteristic as a person: love for a particular city.  Everything about him had to relate back to the city in some way, his friends, his job, his home, etc.  But while initially frustrated, I found that the way his relationship with his wife eventually played out in the to-go-back-or-not argument was very honest and helped make up for it somewhat.  Although maybe I’m overly harsh since I thought his portrayal of the black Williams family was better–at least until the end when everyone seemed so suddenly noble.  It is a sentimental book, and if you’re willing to overlook that, I do recommend it.  Especially since it’s so easy to forget just how dismal the whole experience was.  In fact, I found myself a little upset that he glossed over the hell of the Convention Center within a couple of pages, and that the Superdome was mentioned but never delved into.  That I would have liked to see.

I also just finished Laura Lippman’s new book, Life Sentences.  I tried to avoid all reviews and come into it knowing nothing.  I was impressed that she seems to be more ambitious in this novel, and on the whole I do like the novels that aren’t in her Tess Monaghan series best.  While I have a few minor complaints with the resolution of the book, I love all the issues she delves into.  Memory and memoirs and truth, race, crime, love, family.  I felt her characters were quite full, though the story bounced around from one to the other a bit more than I’d like.  Truth is, she’s one of our best mystery writers and I’ll keep reading pretty much anything she puts out.

Meanwhile, I am trucking through Graham Greene Volume 2, and he is finally a spy!  This one is substantially shorter so hopefully I will make good progress.  However, I am almost decided to give up on my book on Cambodia.  Having been written not long after Vietnam, the book requires a good amount of knowledge that anyone who lived through it would have, but I didn’t so I often feel like I have no clue what’s going on contextually.  I doubt it presents the same problems to readers 20 years older than me, but it is hard to motivate myself to get through it when I feel regularly out of my depth just trying to remember who all these random people in the Nixon administration are.  (Perhaps I should have taken the approach I took with War and Peace and simply written all their names down on my bookmark.  But I still don’t know that it would be successful.  Knowing their position won’t remind me of their political leanings.)  Oh well.  I made an effort.  Maybe I’ll find some good nonfiction audiobooks.  I commute to one of my classes so I’m on the prowl.

Apr

1

Lots of Books

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It has been a while since I read a book like Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys.  At first I was thinking I could compare it to Revolutionary Road from last year, but it’s not a good comparison.  So I’m not sure what I can compare it to that I’ve read recently, which is a little sad.  It is the kind of book I read a lot in high school and college and which I don’t see as much of now.  Specifically, it’s the kind of book that grows after you read it.  (I don’t count Revolutionary Road as this kind of book because I felt that book the most while in it, even though it was stuck in my head for days afterwards.)  For a variety of reasons, I didn’t read it quite as well as I should’ve, but it’s my belief that a book like this always has an imperfect first reading.  I don’t like to come into a book knowing what I should be looking for, and so often I don’t find what’s most important.

While reading Wide Sargasso Sea was interesting, it was only after it was over that I had time to do some reading on the themes.  I wanted to do that exploring because I really felt like there was a lot I’d missed along the way.  (For example, how did this become an NC-17 rated movie?  Turned out, if you breezed through a couple of pages too quickly, the entire sexual element of the book could be missed.)  I did a bit of flipping backwards and read a few articles and now I feel like it would be a good book to come back to in 5 years.  I can definitely see why it’s taught so much, I could totally crank out a paper on Colonialism as reflected in the Antoinette/Rochester relationship in a day or so and it would actually be pretty interesting.

I do think what’s best about the book has little to do with Jane Eyre itself.  It is useful as a starting point, but I think I like the issues inside the book more than I like that outer context.  And I tend to think it’s meant to be that way.

I just finished Transmission by Hari Kunzru, the guy who wrote the 60’s radical book that I thought was okay a few posts ago.  I could tell he was a writer I was interested in, even if I found the book not as interesting.  I liked Transmission a lot, I’m a little surprised I didn’t read it earlier but I guess sometimes subject matter can be offputting and reading about a programmer who creates a computer virus didn’t exactly send me running off to the library.  I did like how Kunzru spun the story of the immigrating Indian on its head, especially since there are so many Indian-American writers these days writing about that particular experience as a successful one.  This protagonist does not do graduate work at MIT but instead is held in a kind of indentured servitude we’d like to think doesn’t exist in this country.  He also makes the cultural differences play out in more interesting ways than just writing about food and clothes.

The book also has a nice skewering of the pre-recession corporate world.  Such skewerings are not hard to find, but they do have their place and this one works well.  The jumping storylines and multiple protagonists do feel jumbled until they come together at the end, but it worked okay.  Mostly, I felt taken for the ride.  I read the book in only one sitting.  I am debating whether to read Kunzru’s first novel, The Impressionist, which sounds like something I’d either love or despise.

I also read in short time The Seance by John Harwood.  Harwood is exactly why I write this blog.  I know for a fact that I read his first novel.  I think I mostly liked it, but I know I didn’t love it and I know there are reasons why but I can’t remember them.  I can’t even remember the plot.  I just remember it being gothic.  I love gothic.  (See recent favorites like Affinity by Sarah Waters or Angelica by Arthur Phillips.)  I heard his new novel was good, if marred by the ending.  And this is precisely true.  The novel really works in setting you in the time period, giving the characters, and then working rather impressively through a series of narrations through letters and diaries that end up fitting together quite well.  If only the ending hadn’t been really pushing the boundaries of absurdity and was all tied up just so quickly that I often had to go back a few pages to figure out what had just happened.  The protagonist’s logical leaps often made no sense to me and weren’t explained.  Still, I can say I like Harwood.  He just needs to work on those endings a little.  (And find a less generic title.  While there are seances in the book, they end up playing only a marginal role.)

I have been reading a lot, actually.  I found Dream House and A Complicated Kindness mostly forgettable.  But I have finally started reading P. D. James mysteries, and I’m not sure why it’s taken me so long.  I feel like I’m reading what Agatha Christie would write if she were writing now, more of a modern, character-driven style.  Granted, the first one I read, A Certain Justice, had a pretty terrible ending, but I enjoyed the buildup and the quality of the writing enough that I got over it.  I hear it’s not one of her better ones, so I’ll have to seek out some others.

Meanwhile, the Tournament has ended.  Overall, while there are always matches that leave me annoyed, I was mostly glad to see 2666 not tramp through the thing like a steamroller.  It was interesting to see the different takes on that novel in particular, though I still feel pretty good about not reading it.  I wasn’t sure A Mercy would make it as far as it did, but I have to say that it’s an affecting book that seems to come at you out of nowhere.  It felt like something new for Morrison, even if the subject is one she’s examined before.  And it’s definitely a return to form, which is nice, since she’s an incredibly impressive writer who you don’t just admire but you enjoy.  As for the other big victor, City of Refuge, a little-known novel on Katrina, it’s currently sitting in Eric’s kindle waiting to be read.  And even if not one but two judges knocked out Frankie Landau-Banks simply because they just did not get it on any level, at least I know I am not alone in how much I love it.