Randy's reads in 2014

Welcome. This is my third year in the 75 Book Challenge. I'm located in Waterloo, Ontario, where there is both a fabulous public library and a superb independent bookstore within walking distance of my home. Just lucky, I guess!



Feel free to comment on my reviews, or tell me about the book that is your current passion. Or just lurk. That's what I'm probably doing elsewhere, since I'm not very good at posting on other threads. But beware, even lurkers end up adding (too) many books to their TBR lists. I certainly do.

Best of luck on your challenge for 2014!

Books Read in 2014

January
1. Reading and the Reader: The Literary Agenda by Philip Davis
2. A Multitude of Sins by Richard Ford
3. Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
4. Mad Hope by Heather Birrell
5. Open City by Teju Cole
6. The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving: A Novel by Jonathan Evison
7. Twenty Grand: And Other Tales of Love and Money by Rebecca Curtis

February
8. Three Day Road by Joseph Boyden

March
9. Bark: Stories by Lorrie Moore
10. This is the Story of a Happy Marriage by Ann Patchett
11. Through Black Spruce by Joseph Boyden
12. Black Cat Bone by John Burnside
13. One Writer's Beginnings by Eudora Welty
14. Under the Keel: Poems by Michael Crummey
15. The End of the Alphabet by C.S. Richardson
16. Coventry: A Novel by Helen Humphreys
17. Pastoralia: Stories by George Saunders
18. The Wild Things by Dave Eggers
19. Ravelstein by Saul Bellow
20. No Great Mischief by Alistair MacLeod

April
21. CivilWarLand in Bad Decline by George Saunders
22. The Emperor of Paris by C.S. Richardson
23. The Tale of Don l'Orignal by Antonine Maillet
24. Island: The Collected Stories by Alistair MacLeod
25. Pélagie: The Return to Acadie by Antonine Maillet
26. Things Look Different in the Light and other Stories by Medardo Fraile
27. Rise Again!: The Story of Cape Breton Island, Book One by Robert J. Morgan
28. Play the Monster Blind: Stories by Lynn Coady

May
29. A Fraction of the Whole by Steve Toltz
30. Jesus' Son: Stories by Denis Johnson

June
31. The Safety of Objects: Stories by A.M. Homes
32. At Freddie's by Penelope Fitzgerald
33. Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout

August
34. One For The Books by Joe Queenan

September
35. Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life by Hermione Lee
36. Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay by Elena Ferrante

October
37. Wittgenstein Jr by Lars Iyer
38. The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil by George Saunders
39. May We Be Forgiven by A.M. Homes
40. Artful by Ali Smith
41. Who Do You Think You Are? by Alice Munro
42. Troubling Love by Elena Ferrante

November
43. 10:04 by Ben Lerner
44. Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End by Atul Gawande
45. We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler
46. The Apartment by Greg Baxter
47. Death and the Afterlife by Samuel Scheffler
48. The World to Come by Dara Horn
49. Self-Editing for Fiction Writers by Renni Browne and Dave King
50. The End of the Story by Lydia Davis
51. Drinking Coffee Elsewhere by ZZ Packer
52. The Lost Daughter by Elena Ferrante
53. Let Me Be Frank With You by Richard Ford
54. The Heather Blazing by Colm Tóibín
55. The Eye of Zoltar by Jasper Fforde
56. The Ask by Sam Lipsyte
57. Married Love by Tessa Hadley
58. The Accidental by Ali Smith
59. Bento's Sketchbook by John Berger

December
60. The Verificationist by Donald Antrim
61. Genesis by Bernard Beckett
62. Someone To Watch Over Me by Richard Bausch
63. Everything Will Be All Right by Tessa Hadley
64. The Other Walk: Essays by Sven Birkerts
65. Levels of Life by Julian Barnes
66. Foreigners: stories by Stephen Finucan
67. Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion
68. All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews
69. Elect Mr. Robinson For A Better World By Donald Antrim
70. Girl Meets Boy by Ali Smith
71. The Cellist of Sarajevo by Steven Galloway
72. The Journey Prize Stories 26 compiled by The Journey Prize Stories compiled by Steven W. Beattie, Craig Davidson and Saleema Nawaz

Here are my top picks from 2013.

Five best reads of 2013

To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf - A novel of and about attention that fully warrants all the attention you can give it.
My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante - A brilliant friendship beautifully explored. Definitely read everything you can by Ferrante.
Tenth of December by George Saunders - Stories with characters so vulnerable, so susceptible to destruction by themselves and others, that only Saunders’ love for them can sustain them.
Traveling Sprinkler by Nicholson Baker - The welcome return of the sentimental and affecting poet, Paul Chowder.
Birds of America by Lorrie Moore - Less arch, less achingly funny than early Moore, but even more poignant and existentially defiant.

I've left off only Jane Austen's Emma, which tops my top five every year I read it.

Welcome back! I wish I had a library within walking distance, but at least mine's a very good one and on my way home from work.

To the Lighthouse is a perennial favorite of mine, as I'm a Woolfian. And Paul Chowder back again, eh? I am going to have to get that book. *sigh* here for 5 seconds and hit by a book bullet.

Hi Randy!

Another Emma fan! I'm probably due for a re-read soon.

Happy New Year, Randy! I got a number of great recommendations from your thread last year, so I'm looking forward to see what you have for me in 2014. :-)

Welcome Jim, and Richard, and Diana, and Carrie, and Julia. Great to see that the 2014 version of the 75 Books Challenge is just as busy (busy? how about "frenetic"?) as ever. Good reading to each of you in the year ahead.

>Ooh, what is the superb indie bookstore in Waterloo?? I live in Burlington, but both of my best friends live in KW, so I am there a lot!

#10 Hi, Cait. I was referring to Words Worth Books. The proprietors and all the staff are great at recommending books because they are all avid readers themselves.

>11 RandyMetcalfe: - Thanks Randy, I will check it out the next time I am in KW!

To The Lighthouse is such a great read! Sending you Happy New Year wishes from Canada's west coast! Looking forward to following your reading in 2014.

# 13 Thanks, Lori. And Happy New Year to you too.

Indeed, Happy New Year to everyone on LT. Now, if I could only spend the rest of this day reading :-)

Happy New Year, Randy, from BC! I lurk here somewhat regularly! Ah, a Jane Austen fan, too!

#15 Thanks, Nancy. Come back any time to lurk or chat. And have a very Happy New Year!

1. Reading and the Reader: The Literary Agenda by Philip Davis

What this book would like to be is a defence of the value of reading serious literature. To that end Philip Davis attempts to mark a distinctive “holding-ground” that is created when a reader engages attentively with a text. Within this “space”, he thinks, different types of thinking are possible and in most cases take place. Of course that might all just be a fanciful idyll if there were no connection between literature and the world at large. It happens that there is such a connection, Davis argues, and this in effect is what underwrites the value of literature and its study even in the face of recent attacks on the utility of the humanities. It is a conclusion that many readers, especially, would like to take up. Whether they should do so on the basis of this argument, however, is somewhat doubtful.

Initially it seems as though Davis wants to present us with a phenomenology of reading. But he eschews such technical and theory-laden efforts in favour of close readings of literary texts. No doubt Wordsworth’s “She dwelt amongst the untrodden ways” powerfully evokes a sense of loss in almost any reader. But how does this example, or any number of further examples, explicate Davis’ notion of a “holding-ground”. In truth it does not. Instead we have a series of plausible examples of occasions on which, as readers, we fully engage with a text, but in the end all that does is to confirm that Davis’ “holding-ground” is a metaphor. A powerful and appealing metaphor, surely, but nonetheless a metaphor. And metaphors alone will not accomplish the heavy lifting — the real philosophical work — that is required to firmly ground Davis’ further explorations of the value of reading serious literature.

In the book’s third section, Davis draw upon an insight of George Steiner’s to note that readers are “always secretly hopeful that this time this work might be the work, offering revelation.” Davis acknowledges how naive, but also irresistible, this is. Alas, I too am subject to such hopes. But this is not the book that will fulfil them. Maybe I’ll have better luck with the next one.

2. A Multitude of Sins by Richard Ford

The stories collected here reveal Ford in his full mastery of the short form. Always unsettling, always turning away from the direct path. Ford’s characters are always undercutting themselves, and their intentions, second guessing, as it were, their own second guesses. It is a deliberative technique, so much so that at times the reader feels, here, that the technique takes precedence over the characters and their stories. And yet, even unsettled and unsettling, Ford remains vital and needs to be read.

Some of the stories are near classics. “Puppy” takes the unwanted abandonment of a dog within a couple’s fenced-in property as the catalyst for the disintegration of their relationship. “Crèche” is even more disastrous, in personal terms, as a broken extended family breaks even further during a misguided Christmas skiing vacation. “Under the Radar” is both unnerving and violent, explosively so as a wife confesses to having had an affair with the host of dinner party to which the couple are on route. Violence ensues but it isn’t entirely the anticipated violence. And there is just a hint that it might be a mercy, or at least no great deviation from nature.

The final long story (or short novella), “Abyss”, follows two real estate agents who are having an affair. Ford masterfully moves from one character’s point of view to the other’s in extremely close proximity, at times from one sentence to the next. Their actions, of course, define them, as the one character notes, but beyond that there are their words and behind their words, thoughts and intentions. Ford shows how what they say is often, perhaps always, undercut by what they think or intend, and both stand at odds with what they do. For characters so out of touch with their authentic being, it might be no surprise that a great abyss lies before them, though in this case it is the Grand Canyon itself. In another writer it might have turned into pathetic fallacy, but with Ford it blows past that risk and moves on to something altogether different.

There are very few characters to identify with in these stories, fewer still to feel sympathetic towards, and yet the writing is never less than compelling. Recommended, as ever.

Randy, the Ford book sounds really good. I've never read any of his short stories, only the Bascombe novels (oh, and "Canada" which I kind of hated). I think I'll give this one a try.

#19 Hi, Julia. You'd be surprised how many of the stories in this collection mention Canada. One story is even set in Montreal. It's definitely on his mind. And I don't think he fully gets it out of his system even in Canada. (Perhaps if he came to visit us at the moment when it is -24c, he might not be so enamoured of whatever it is Canada represents for him.) As a collection of stories, I think I prefer his first book Rock Springs, but that may simply be because I read that first.

3. Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes

Charlie Gordon has been selected for a scientific experiment. Although he is excessively challenged, mentally and emotionally, he has one thing working in his favour — a great desire to learn and make himself smarter. It is that positive outlook that sets him apart from his peers and which typifies his life subsequent to the “operation” that forms the basis of the experiment. After the operation it is as though the floodgates have been opened and very quickly Charlie’s abilities and intelligence begin to improve. In fact they go on improving, rapidly, until he has a genius I.Q. But there are costs. The world is not quite the way he imagined it before he got smart. And there is also a lot of learning to be done that can’t be got from books. And, sadly, his new found abilities are only temporary. And it is a long way down.

The story is told entirely in the first person in the form of a series of reports that Charlie writes for the scientists conducting the experiment. In this way we dramatically see the improvement in his spelling, his grammar, and his grasp of concepts. He also has a troubled personal history that only surfaces as his memory begins to improve. The relations of parents and siblings, their duties and responsibilities, forms a counterpoint to the main story arc and thematic exploration of what it means to be a person, a being worthy of respect and love. The ideas under debate are not subtly presented, but on the other hand they are also not fully settled either. That is, the debates remain live even at the end of the novel. And perhaps this is what has given it enduring fascination. It isn’t straightforward what we ought to say of Charlie or for Charlie. And the writing here is not so daunting as to make the reader think that Keyes has sorted out these questions himself.

There is an element of sentimentalism in such a story arc. Perhaps that is inevitable. It would be hard not to feel something for Charlie’s fate. But whether these feelings amount to more than structurally triggered sentiment is an open question. And that does not detract from the overall worth of this well-loved tale.

******

This is one of those books that everyone else seems to have read as a youth but which passed me by entirely (although I knew the basic story). I have read it now because it came up as the next book in the book club I frequent. Does it date more than other “classics”? Perhaps. Certainly I think the same story would be handled differently if it were tackled by a YA writer today. Some of the treatment of experimental psychology and of therapy seems awkward. And there are some assumptions that look fantastical, such as Charlie’s language learning prowess. Nevertheless I am looking forward to a lively discussion at the end of the month.

I read Flowers for Algernon in junior high & I remember loving it. Wonder what I would think of it now? Might be a good one to go back & re-visit as an adult.

That is an absolutely wonderful review and an enticement for me to read Flowers for Algernon for the first time. I keep saying that I am going to read it, but have I?..... Nope, not yet. Time to fix that.

Have a wonderful weekend, Randy!

#24 Thanks, Diana. And you too!

#23 Thanks, Lori. I'm not actually sure I would recommend Flowers for Algernon except to completists. But it is a quick read :-)

#22 I don't remember reading any YA books in school, but maybe I'm misremembering, or maybe I'm really old (which may be why I'm misremembering).

Randy, I really like "Flowers for Algernon" when I read it many years ago, but the ending was so darn sad.

Re: not reading YA books in school, I'm not sure how old you are (probably not as ancient as me) but I don't recall ever seeing a book referred to as YA when I was in school. It feels like there were kid books and adult books and that was pretty much it. I'm sure I'm wrong, but it didn't seem to be quite the phenomenon that it is today.

#26 I agree, Julia.

I followed up by watching the Cliff Robertson film version of the story titled Charly. I'm sure I saw that film years and years ago. But now, of course, I can see how substantially it deviates from the book. The main story arc is there but not much of the other story lines.

Boy, Flowers for Algernon certainly takes me back to my Junior High days. It's one of the few frequently-assigned classics that *didn't* escape me, for some reason. I'm trying to work may way through the long list of others in that category.

#28 Hi, Amber. It can certainly be eye opening to read, today, which were (or perhaps still are) Zeitgeist shaping. I've picked up a couple over the past few years and each time it has been worthwhile.

4. Mad Hope by Heather Birrell

“You’ll never succeed in pleasing everybody,” says Geraldine, a grieving widower waiting in a doctor’s office for a mammogram. She says this to Jerome, an insouciant teen who is waiting as well, in this case for his mother, who has had a mastectomy. Geraldine is not entirely certain herself whether her advice is something she still believes, or whether it is just something someone told her once. It doesn’t matter. Jerome is having none of it. “‘I got mad hope,’ Jerome said. ‘Mad hope.’” In the face of everything, perhaps only mad hope will do.

Heather Birrell’s stories are not all filled with mad hope but hope does burble up here and there, insistently. At her best, for example in her award winning “BriannaSusannaAlana”, the voices of young urban girls and women are precise and nuanced and full of life. Children, longing for children, loss of children, and loss of innocence feature prominently. In “Wanted Children”, depression following a miscarriage is compounded by a misguided exotic vacation that was intended to shake the couple out of their disappointment. In “Drowning Doesn’t Look Like Drowning”, a young mother frets over her three children as recompense, perhaps, for losing her own mother at a young age. In “Frogs”, a physician who had been co-opted by the Ceaușescu progeny programme in Romania confronts his guilt and repentance teaching high school biology in Canada years later.

Few of these stories strike new narrative ground but they are all rich in their way. The three stories in the middle of the collection — “Dominoes”, “Bye Bye Flangle Nuts”, and “Dingbat” — tread the same ground and indeed involve the same set of incidents (death of the father and estrangement of the family) from different perspectives. They aren’t linked per se. Rather they feel more like three separate attempts at ferreting out some truth from those events. The iterations being both a sign perhaps of failure, as well as continuing hope that the author will finally get it right. And that probably is as mad of a hope as one could hope for. Gently recommended.

5. Open City by Teju Cole

Julius, the narrator and protagonist of Teju Cole’s debut novel, is a psychiatrist doing his residency at New York’s Presbyterian Hospital. He lives a solitary life that consists of long work rotations, and long walks through nearby parks and onward to locales in mid-town and lower Manhattan. He travels infrequently and when he does he puts together all of his vacation time in order to spend a number of weeks in Brussels in rainy mid-winter. Julius is, perhaps surprisingly, well-read — he has a long-standing friendship with his aged former English professor from his university days — and he is a deep and subtle appreciator of classical music and art. In a country of immigrants, it is not surprising to learn that Julius is also an immigrant. He spent his formative years in Nigeria, the privileged only child of a mixed race couple. His widowed mother, from whom he is estranged, was originally from Germany. And it is those roots that he is chasing during his Belgian holiday, since he believes that his mother’s mother (the two are also estranged) has moved to Brussels. Time passes. Julius meets some new people and encounters a few people from his past. He reflects upon literature and art and music and, more rarely, the fundaments of psychiatry. And then the novel ends, without comment or cause or resolution (if there were in fact anything there to be resolved). The effect is rather like reading a single volume of a multi-volume diary. Which rather heightens the challenge that Cole lays down for his anti-narrativist narrative.

The writing here is lean and unemotional. Cole’s narrator describes his day, his walks, some of the sites in New York, his engagement with certain novels and certain composers, and yet the reader never feels as though they are penetrating beyond the burnished exterior of this character. It is as though he, either deliberately or unintentionally, is holding us at bay. It is a style often associated with W.G. Sebald, but it might also be seen latterly in Joseph O’Neill. Cole’s mastery of this technique is remarkable, for a first novel. It has the advantage of facilitating abstruse discussion of art and politics and race and history. All of which makes this novel both a challenging and an intriguing encounter. But such a distancing technique can also limit understanding even as it suppresses emotional engagement.

What do we really learn of Julius? Is he a trustworthy narrator? Do we gain any insight into his Nigerian background? What about the surely compelling story of his mother? What about that grandmother whom he only vaguely attempts to trace in Brussels? In some ways this is a frustrating novel, even if that frustration is both compelled and compelling. So I find myself uncertain, finally, about what to say about Open City. Yet, I have no hesitation in recommending it, if only because you will want to be sure to read everything that this young novelist eventually writes.

6. The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving: A Novel by Jonathan Evison

Benjamin is a father. Or rather he was a father. Now he is the doubly bereaved parent, former stay-at-home dad, future ex-spouse of Janet. Janet is determined to put their tragedy behind her and move on without Ben. Ben’s life may have unravelled a couple of years ago but he is still holding on to the final few threads for no apparent reason. He won’t sign the final divorce papers. And, after a short course leading to a certificate, he is embarking on a new career as a caregiver, even though he is clearly the one in need of care. Ben’s first posting is with a nineteen year old boy, Trev, who has MD. Trev is wheelchair bound and, perhaps not surprisingly in this novel, has failed father issues as well. Bob, Trev’s father, left his wife and son in the lurch, unable to cope with the prognosis. Bob would now like to return and rebuild his shattered relationship with his son, but Bob has more things going wrong than merely poor parenting. ‘More’ is an understatement, since Bob is a nightmare of ineptitude. However, he is no worse than Ben in many ways, and later, we discover numerous other failed fathers. It’s like a club but without the comfy seats and refreshments.

There is no way not to know what is likely to happen in this novel. That’s not because of the clunky parallel structure through which, in alternate chapters, Ben recounts the fateful days leading up to the deaths of his two young children. It’s because the characters are paper thin and the plot is a single thread. The author, in an afternote, shares some of the personal tragedy of his life that clearly spurred on the writing of this novel. He claims not to know why the story, after the mid-point, turned into a road novel. Ben and Trev pack up Trev’s wheelchair accessible van and head out to see some of the stranger sites (sights?) of America, ostensibly headed to a reconciliation between Bob and Trev. The reason the novel takes this turn is due to the thinness of the characters. They need the episodic interactions that the road provides in order to carry the load that more substantial characters might have taken on. Sure enough, Ben and Trev meet a host of odd souls, undergo trial and tribulation, and eventually grow a bit. Before the end, Ben is tasked, literally, with cutting an umbilical cord. So we’re not talking subtle here.

Despite its weaknesses, I don’t want to be too hard on this novel. Perhaps I’m at an age when I empathize a bit with sad sack heroes. And even if the content is insubstantial, at least it doesn’t feel pernicious.

7. Twenty Grand: And Other Tales of Love and Money by Rebecca Curtis

Like many first short story collections, Rebecca Curtis’ Twenty Grand explores a variety of styles and themes — signs of a young writer searching for her unique voice perhaps. What makes this collection special is that Curtis writes so well no matter which direction she turns. She offers heightened realism in “Summer, with Twins” or “The Alpine Slide”, stories that are told from the perspective of a quirky young woman protagonist. Our sympathies engage, but there is also something slightly askew. In other stories, such as “The Wolf at the Door” or “Monsters”, Curtis dips into George Saunders’ surrealist territory. Still others, like “Knick, Knack, Paddywhack” or “Solicitation” or even “To the Interstate” have the feel of more experimental McSweeney’s-type pieces. But perhaps the best stories combine aspects of each of these modes through which Curtis arrives at a kind of heightened surrealism — stories that on the surface seem straightforwardly realist but keep pitching over toward whatever horrors lie off the even keel. Here, the title story, “Twenty Grand”, and “Big Bear, California”, and also “The Witches” set the mark.

Since I’ve mentioned almost every story in the collection, it will come as no surprise that I think Rebecca Curtis is a young writer worth watching. There is so much potential here. And for that alone I would gladly recommend this collection. The edition I had also included a P.S. section at the end, which is not untypical these days. There I was expecting to find an interview or something further about the author. Curtis has taken this section and turned it to good effect by using those twenty pages to pick out favourite places, businesses, and activities in her home state of New Hampshire, possibly to redress some of the seedier views she presents in her stories, many of which are set in New Hampshire locales. Sounds like a straightforward project, but here it is just as curious and heightened and slightly askew as the rest of the writing, so don’t skip the P.S. I’m already looking forward to whatever else Curtis will eventually publish.

Some very nice reviews, Randy, to finish out the month. None of them quite clicked with me to force me to add them to the wishlist, thankfully, but you never know what will happen if I spot them at the library.

8. Three Day Road by Joseph Boyden

Elijah and Xavier are native childhood friends growing to young manhood in the bush near Moose Factory in northern Ontario under the guidance of Xavier’s aunt, the Windigo (cannibal) killer. Elijah is talkative and brave. Xavier is more thoughtful, more like his auntie, but the better shot, the better hunter, the one who teaches Elijah the ways of the bush after Elijah’s formative and damaging experience in the residential school he was forced to attend. When Canada enters a great war in a foreign land, Elijah convinces Xavier to travel south with him to a town large enough where they can join up. They will become hunters of men, scouts and snipers, in the blasted mud of no-man’s-land between the lines of trenches in WWI. It is a life that Elijah takes to with abandon, drawing on his friend who remains the better shot. But it is truly not a land for men and in time Elijah loses himself as the madness of blood takes him. Almost inevitably, Xavier is forced to fulfil his birthright as the next generation of Windigo killer.

The story of Elijah and Xavier’s journey is told in retrospect after Xavier’s arrival home from the front minus a leg and with a crushing morphine addiction. His auntie aids him in recovering himself, slowly, as they wind their way by canoe back from town to their home in the deep bush. Together they will make a further journey of spirit, opening up the possibility of a future for both Xavier and his tribe.

The writing here is never less than crisp and mature, despite this being a first novel. The archetypal storyline, twinned and twisted helix-like, lends strength to the sometimes predictable action. But the action here should be predictable since we are in the land of the near-mythic. And Boyden rarely puts a foot wrong. Although there is a great deal here of life in the trenches and the land between, always the more interesting part of the tale is the account of Xavier’s earlier life and especially that of his auntie. It offers an insight into native engagement in Canada’s military struggles without pretending to give a final rendering. Warmly recommended.

Well, that one sounds very interesting, Randy!

Hi, Julia. Three Day Road is certainly worth a read. I'm on to Boyden's second novel now, which garnered even more awards though I'm finding it slower to get into.

So far February has been a down month for reading. I blame it on the weather, an horrendous cold that just wouldn't give up, and a book club read that I just couldn't motivate myself to finish (I returned it to the library as someone else had put it on hold). Oh well, as ever, there are better reads ahead.

The weather this winter has been enough to make me think seriously about hibernating. It's hard to settle into a good book when you are always cold. And I have definitely experienced the way a mediocre book (or a book that I'm just not in the mood for at that time) affects the rest of my reading. It's hard for me to give up on a book but at the same time I'm not a fan of having several books going at once, so if a book is dragging I tend to read less and less often until I either finish it or kick it to the curb. Sounds like you made the right choice with yours.

Three Day Road was a difficult book for me to read, and I've never really come to terms with it. A very very interesting review, Randy, and thank you.

Thanks, Richard. I've have Boyden's books sitting on my shelves for what seems like years now. It seemed it was time to find out what's there.

9. Bark: Stories by Lorrie Moore

There are reasons to feel lucky to be alive. One of them is that Lorrie Moore is writing short stories. Amongst the eight stories collected here are enough masterpieces to make you believe all over again that Moore may be the reason that the short story was invented. And the others — well, I don’t know. It’s very possible that in a year I might come round to thinking those other stories are the real masterpieces. I’ll admit that Moore is often ahead of the curve.

Some stories here have all the elements of classic Lorrie Moore. The long opening story, “Debarking”, is one of those. It is full of quirky observations, puns and half-puns and other word-play, excruciatingly poignant moments, and, well, exuberance, I guess. Even in the midst of what is really a sad or pathetic situation, there is exuberance. “Paper Losses” is another in this classic Lorrie Moore manner. Nearly priceless. Other stories, such as “Referential” show Moore in narrative dialogue with her peers, in this case Nabokov. In some stories, Moore seems frustrated, even angry, with the politics of America. There is a level of incredulousness that begins to creep in perhaps in stories such as “Foes” or “Subject to Search”. And there are yet other stories that don’t have any easy category. A story like “Wings” seems serious and anxious and possibly almost painful. It’s one of those ones that maybe, after a bit more thought, I’ll decide is actually a masterpiece. Moore’s writing is like that — it prompts more thought.

Warmly recommended.

Her stories come in for a lot of well-earned praise.

10. This is the Story of a Happy Marriage by Ann Patchett

Collections of non-fiction essays by famous novelists and short story writers tend to consist in occasional pieces or commissioned works. Somewhat unusually, Ann Patchett set about learning the skill of the short non-fiction essay for the straightforward reason that she needed to earn her keep whilst she toiled away on novels. Her proving ground was in magazines such as Seventeen and she was by no means a natural. She wrote many items and rewrote them many times before she had her first one accepted. But she had remarkable sticktoitiveness. Of course by the time she achieved the style required, her editors had managed to denude her writing of almost anything personal or idiosyncratic. And so many of the earlier pieces in this collection come across as efficient, uncluttered, easy to read, but also somewhat uninteresting. Almost anyone picking up this volume will be more interested in Ann Patchett the novelist and bookstore owner than in anything else she might happen to be writing about.

It takes a long time to unlearn the engrained habits of youth. Fortunately, Ann Patchett’s personality does gradually begin to emerge. This makes the final quarter of the collection, which is arranged in order of publication, much more satisfying than the first quarter. Fans of Ann Patchett will be more than satisfied, since her life is certainly one worth telling, worth re-telling, and even perhaps worth inventing. I thoroughly enjoyed the long essay whose title is used for the collection as a whole. In another, I was struck by the poignant scene at the funeral of Eudora Welty when Welty’s elderly relations use Ann’s attendance (whom they do not know) as evidence for younger Welty relations that the recently deceased was indeed someone famous. For those of us curious about the practicalities of the writing life, there is much here, including insights into “Book Tour” which Patchett presents unarticled, not unlike “Fight Club” I suppose. And these days, the story of how Ann Patchett became perhaps the most famous independent bookstore owner in America has become, literally, front page news, which is here laid out in all its particulars.

None of these essays is overly challenging. Each is competently written. And some, the best of them, begin to evoke what the anxious reader might hope is a bit of the personal aura of Ann Patchett. Gently recommended.

11. Through Black Spruce by Joseph Boyden

Two stories intertwine. One is the story of Will Bird, aging son of the WWI war hero Xavier Bird whose story was told in Boyden’s first novel, Three Day Road. The other is the story of Annie, Will’s niece and heir to his father’s and great aunt’s talents as a spirit walker. Annie’s tale is told to the comatose Will in an effort to rouse him from his injury induced coma. Annie has been south to Toronto and on to Montreal and New York in search of her missing sister, Suzanne, whose meteoric rise in the world of high fashion is nearly as mysterious as her equally sudden vanishing. Annie traces Suzanne’s steps even to the point of becoming a model herself and slipping under the drug-fueled thrall of glamour parties, trance music, and sexual desire. Fortunately for Annie, she has picked up a protector in the mute native, Gordon, whose loyalty is unlimited. As Annie tells her tale to her prostrate uncle in the hospital in Moose Factory she both reveals herself and also comes to know herself, especially as this relates to her roots. For as well as being incredibly beautiful and sexy, Annie happens to also be a great hunter and bush person. (Yes, well, the combination does stretch credulity, but it’s just something you’ll have to go with.)

Will’s story is inaudible to the waking world. In his struggle to regain consciousness he recounts some of his life as though to his two nieces. In particular he focuses upon the recent events in Moosonee during which he has been in a simmering feud with the local native drug baron, Marius Netmaker, who has it in for Will in part due to Will’s niece, Suzanne, having run off with Gus, also of the Netmaker clan. Will isn’t fully aware of the source of Marius’ anger, but he rightly assumes it has a history, which only comes to light much later. Together Will and Annie tell their stories through alternating chapters that wind around each other like a double helix, a suitable image for the genetic threads that bind each of these characters together.

Through Black Spruce starts more slowly than its predecessor, Three Day Road. In some ways, I suppose, it is harder to make present day native life in northern Ontario fully believable. Certainly Annie is a bundle of conflicting influences. And even Will, who has spent his life as a daring and brave bush pilot, mixes the ancient and the technologically advanced in a volatile cocktail. But once Annie’s story has taken her south to Toronto it takes on a pace of its own. There are missteps for each of the characters, but perhaps fewer for Boyden himself. The result is a melodramatic tale enriched by its northern Cree roots which will hold your interest and, at times, provoke further thought. Gently recommended.

12. Black Cat Bone by John Burnside

I'm not offering a review of this award winning collection of poetry. I often just don't feel up to the task and even moreso with what I suspect is especially fine poetry. Certainly I enjoyed reading each poem in the collection. The images are typically concrete, based in nature, with unheightened diction. Perhaps that makes it sound like they are easy poems, but that is not the case. Even on a second reading, I didn't feel as though there could be any glib response to them. Each one is sufficiently thoughtful and thought provoking to warrant not just two readings, but many readings, probably very slowly and undoubtedly best followed by a lengthy conversation with someone more knowledgeable than me, perhaps over a glass of wine or two.

In fact, that is just what I intend to do, since this was one of the books my wife selected in her top three of 2013.

13. One Writer's Beginnings by Eudora Welty

Begun as a series of three lectures delivered at Harvard in 1983, Eudora Welty’s One Writer’s Beginnings traces the confluence of events and history, persons and places, that at that late point looking back upon her writing career she takes to constitute her vision or her voice. While much of any writer’s beginnings will inevitably concern their particular childhood — teachers, key events, distant relatives to whom one learns relation — Welty’s lens plays as much upon her parents as upon herself. And so we learn of her father’s move from Ohio to West Virginia, where he met Eudora’s mother. And we learn how the two young newlyweds made a conscious decision to set out for pastures new, settling in Jackson, Mississippi, where later Eudora is born and raised and where her parents remain the rest of the lives, barring holiday excursions usually to family back in West Virginia or Ohio.

Welty has an assured and comfortable gait as she wanders amongst these paths of memory. Without appearing to fixate on telling individuals or activities, she gently associates some of her early experiences with characters in her later stories or novels. More important, perhaps, is the insight she draws from such associations, as though through telling her personal past she is reading her own fiction. The effect is one of clear and penetrating analysis without rancour.

The writing is always a pleasure to read and, though brief, it would be hard not to feel at the end as though one had learned a great deal about Welty, as a writer, through this canvassing of some of her important memories. Gently recommended along with a reminder to go back and read Welty’s fiction — all of it.

14. Under the Keel: Poems by Michael Crummey

Poetry again, and once again I'm going to set aside my normal habit of review. Unusually, indeed for the first time, the book club that I participate in set a collection of poetry as our read for March. I'm entirely unsure what sort of conversation we will be having next week. I imagine it might not be anything like the ones we've had of fiction, biography, and non-fiction. For my part, I'll be saying there that I enjoyed reading this collection. Crummey's poetry (he first made his name as a poet) is lyrical, typically set in the Newfoundland of his youth, and personal, with a regular intrusion of the "I". This might make it appear to be youthful poetry -- and to be sure he has an almost eternally youthful appearance -- but in fact he is now amongst the senior poets of Canada. This can make his poems here seem superficial, glancing observations which do not prompt suspicions of deep thought or even deep feeling. Maybe that's unfair. As ever, I find I need to read poems two or three or more times before I have a settled view on them. So I'll give this collection another couple of reads before I meet the other members of my book club to find out how poorly I've understood them.

In context, I should say that I have always been impressed with Crummey's fiction, both his lengthy historical novels and most especially his short stories, both of which might also be described as lyrical and personal. So perhaps my opinion of these poems just needs a bit more seasoning.

Happy Thingaversary, Randy, and thanks for the appreciative review of one of my favorites, Eudora Welty.

>48 richardderus: Thanks, Richard. You're right. It is my Thingaversary. Five very good years here on LT, the last three of which I've enjoyed especially since joining this group. That's probably reward enough, for now. Though I may just happen to be walking past my local independent bookstore later today :-)

Lists! I demand lists!

Have fun.

15. The End of the Alphabet by C.S. Richardson

Charming. Or perhaps delightful. Or just really sweet and nice without being saccharine. The End of the Alphabet traces the final month in the lives of Ambrose Zephyr and Zappora Ashkenazi. Ambrose has just learned from his doctor that his time is limited. Very limited. And so, together with his wife, Zappora, they set out upon an alphabetical tour of places important to them from their past, or important to them in their imaginations. A is for Amsterdam, and so it goes.

From the shops of Kensington High Street to the rues of Paris to the Piazza della Signoria of Florence, we follow Ambrose and Zappora, drinking in their memories, their romance, and the impending darkness. The pace is gentle. Like walking downhill. And if you too have places on your alphabet of memories, you will feel the full range of emotions that Ambrose and Zappora share.

I especially liked that the story kept true right through to the end. No tricks. No angsty metaphysics. Just the story of two very special people. Warmly recommended.

16. Coventry: A Novel by Helen Humphreys

Coventry traces the steps of three people during the long night of 14 November, 1940, the night on which the German air force reduced the majority of the city to rubble. This is not a tale of geo-politics or the excruciating decision that left Coventry open to such a brutal assault. Rather it is a very particular tale of two women, Helen and Maeve, and of Maeve’s son, Jeremy. The long main section of the novel which details just that night is bracketed by a brief scene in Coventry in 1914 shortly after the onset of WWI, and another brief scene at the dedication ceremony of the re-imagined Coventry Cathedral in 1962. By chance, Helen and Maeve met in Coventry in 1914, sharing a few hours of fellowship and joy only to lose each other for more than twenty years. Helen’s young husband had gone off to fight in France only the month before.

On that fateful night in 1940, Helen, again by chance, meets up with Maeve’s son, Jeremy. Jeremy and Helen are serving as fire-watchers on the roof of Coventry Cathedral. All too soon their oversight is overtaken by the real and unstoppable fires that have been lit from ordinance dropping out of the darkened night. Without knowing who Jeremy is — Maeve and Helen never managed to exchange their own names back in 1914 — Helen feels drawn to him and together they seek a way out of the city centre, first aiming for Helen’s flat and then onward to Jeremy and Maeve’s. Meanwhile Maeve is going through her own night of dread culminating in her frustrating and increasingly desperate search for Jeremy.

The writing here is almost too lovely for the horrors that night in Coventry reveals. But perhaps that is because this is a kind of historical romance, although it’s not always clear whose. And it is romance mingled with grief and, inevitably, an unforced respect for the ability of some individuals to persevere, to rise above their situation, to endure. Gently recommended.

I have been intrigued by Eudora Welty. What do you recommend as a start for her fiction?
We visited Roan Oak, the home of Faulkner and I have been getting more interested in this period of southern writing.

>53 Forthwith: Hi, Michael. I'm certainly not a Welty expert, but I would say that the place to start with her is always her short stories. I confess I've not been systematic in my reading of those. Usually I'm turning to one or another at the instigation of my wife when she says, "What do you mean you've never read x? You've got to read it!" So I'll just mention two short stories that you've "got" to read. "Death of a Traveling Salesman", which was Welty's first published short story. What a way to start your career! And "Why I Live at the PO" which apparently comes out of her experience as a photographer for the WPA in the Mississippi delta. But you might as well pick up her collected stories, since that is readily available and you'll just end up wanting to read them all anyway. Her novels, I'm not so familiar with. There I would probably suggest The Optimist's Daughter, since that is the one for which she won the Pulitzer.

>51 RandyMetcalfe: I like the sound of that one - wishlisted.

And Happy Thingaversary!

>55 scaifea: Thanks, Amber! Once again I didn't purchase my full Thingaversary complement, but I did order C.S. Richardson's next novel, The Emperor of Paris, which will be my special treat.

17. Pastoralia: Stories by George Saunders

George Saunders must surely be the master of the excoriating inner monologue. Across these six stories, his typically sad, misfit, life-bludgeoned characters find fault with themselves (and others, though usually that eventually comes round to self-criticism). It is as though Saunders has looked around him, picked out the saddest, loneliest looking people he can find and then set himself the task of imagining their inner lives. Their inner lives, it turns out, are just about as sad and lonely as their outer lives. Long passages of passionate self-examination and scab picking are then punctuated by brief actions or exchanges involving others. What is most surprising, however, is that these desperately sad characters usually end up doing something brave, self-sacrificing, or noteworthy. Not that anyone notices, or cares, or cares to notice. Except that Saunders himself notices and through him so do we.

The sad characters in Saunders’ stories most often have tedious, mind-numbingly inane, bureaucratically mangled jobs. In the long opening story, “Pastoralia”, the unnamed narrator spends his days as a caveman. He is working at a futuristic theme park with live action recreations of human history. He and the woman portraying his cave wife, Janet, must follow a strict code of cave behaviour throughout the day. They’ve both been at this job a long time. And the theme park isn’t doing especially well, so very few guests poke their heads in to witness the lives of cave people. Just as well as Janet is usually filing her nails or speaking in English (which is not allowed). To be forced to endure such humiliating work might be bad enough but the indignity is magnified by cost-cutting, self-serving management intent on firing as many of the staff as possible to rescue the bottom line. Every person we encounter is desperate about the few dollars that their employment can bring in for their families. Most would do anything to keep their jobs, including ratting out the poor behaviour of their peers. It is a sad and sorry world and Saunders drags us through it by the hair (caveman style). And it has no end. Because, I suppose, life, he is suggesting, has pretty much been like this since the days of our earliest ancestors. Despite its light tone and embarrassingly awkward moments for the characters, the effect is chilling.

The remaining stories, although they share satirical features with “Pastoralia”, tend toward the more hopeful endings mentioned above. It is as though we are seeing Saunders himself progress as a thinker, a writer, a humanist. In the final story of the collection, “The Falls”, the principal narrator, another self-excoriating character named Morse (which might just as well be “morose”), is dragging himself home at the end of another painfully long day at work. No need to detail his particular squalor. What is peculiar here is his action at the very end. Despite all of his convincing of himself not to do it, he goes ahead and does something wonderful. It is so startling that you might wonder whether Saunders himself was surprised by this ending. It really is remarkable.

Every story here is worthy of numerous readings. Heartily recommended.

>57 RandyMetcalfe: That's a wonderful review. I think you have captured the essence of Saunders' writing. I have not read that collection, but now I think I have to.

>58 sturlington: Thanks, Shannon! Very kind.

>51 RandyMetcalfe:: Hi Randy, I already own The End of the Alphabet but it's still unread... Your review tempts me to read it very soon.

>60 PersephonesLibrary: I hope that you enjoy it, Kathy.

18. The Wild Things by Dave Eggers

It probably doesn’t happen very often. A novel, based on a beloved children’s picture book as modulated by the screenplay for an indie film, commissioned by said beloved children’s book author, the novelist to be none other than the enfant terrible novelist and publisher, Dave Eggers. Actually, it sounds rather the plot of a Spike Jonze film.

Eggers does yeoman work with this adaptation (he co-wrote the screenplay for the film as well). His short declarative sentences match the performative bursts of his young protagonist. In the first third of the novel especially, when Max is at home with his sister, Claire, their mother and her boyfriend, Gary, the frustration and anger boiling beneath the surface is palpable, erupting periodically and detrimentally for Max and everyone else. Here Eggers does indeed get inside his protagonist, not unlike the wolf suit that Max will later don. The action and the anger and the irreconcilable muddle of their lives is thoroughly believable.

Where the novel starts to go astray is precisely where the Sendak picture book takes off. Max, now in his wolf suit, runs away from home. There is an awkward transition as Eggers sails him to the unknown isle of the wild things. And then Max is forced to confront a host of monsters in the strange setting in which he is declared to be the king. Children, I understand, are completely entranced by this part of Sendak’s story. Here, not so much. Eggers seems to be labouring, the actions and emotions of the monsters as lumbering and outsized as they are themselves. Whereas in the first third of the novel, the reader feels like anything could happen with the vivid characters that have been presented, here everything feels like stagecraft blocking for a thumping good moral that must surely be just around the corner. That deflates the tension and the narrative drive and eventually the interest of the reader.

Since this rendering of Maurice Sendak’s classic comes across as an exercise, I couldn’t help wondering what would have arisen if it had been commissioned from other writers, perhaps Daniel Handler, or Magnus Mills, or George Saunders, or whomever you like. Perhaps it could be an iterative series. Now that would be something worth reading.

19. Ravelstein by Saul Bellow

I’m not entirely convinced that the roman à clef is a worthy vehicle for a great writer. And there is little doubt that Saul Bellow is a great writer. Nor is there much doubt that numerous characters in his novels have been modelled directly on people he knew intimately, friend and foe. However, only a few of his novels so explicitly take up this correspondence with the non-fictional that they typically get labelled in this manner. Ravelstein, Bellow’s last novel, is one of these. In it, he sketches the larger-than-life character of a professor by the name of Ravelstein, who is a thinly disguised stand-in for Bellow’s friend, Allan Bloom. These are Ravelstein’s last days. He is HIV-positive, subject to numerous rare and unrelenting infections, but determined to see his way out of the world in much the way that he lived in it: unapologetic, highly opinionated, self-centred (in every sense), and fiercely devoted to his close friends. It took Bellow some eight years after the death of Bloom to pen this fictionalized memoir. In the interim he himself came perilously close to death. And so the book as a whole became as much a meditation on death as it is a depiction of one particular death.

At least part of the novel holds up well. In particular, the first section, which was published as a standalone in The New Yorker, is tightly written and full of the flamboyance that ever after gets associated with Ravelstein (and now Bloom). Thereafter the novel begins to unravel. Arguments and anecdotes re-emerge almost without change from their first mention. It begins to seem like Bellow is circling his subject but can’t quite lock it down. He meanders. He is subject to only periodic lucidity. He falters under the weight of the burden that his friend has laid upon him in requesting that he take up this biographical task. Maybe it’s all a brilliant representation of decline. Or, less charitably, it might simply be a less than fully edited effort. At some point, at any rate, I began to lose interest both in the subject, i.e. death, and in the subject, i.e. Ravelstein.

Any writer who lasts as long as Bellow will produce works of varying quality. Fortunately there are many other titles in his oeuvre that will capture, challenge, and delight the reader even if this is not one of them.

20. No Great Mischief by Alistair MacLeod

The past is ever present in the lives of the Scottish Highlanders who faced the long journey from their homelands after the debacle of the Jacobite uprisings of the mid-18th century. The descendants of the MacDonalds who emigrated to Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, are all either red haired or dark haired. Their kin tend toward twins, the speaking of Gaelic, songs of lament, and tragedy. Such is the case for these 20th century heirs in this sad but heartfelt tale. Late one March evening a husband and wife and their fourth son, Colin, disappear under the ice as they are making their way on foot across the ice bridge to the island on which the husband and father is the lighthouse keeper. Three older sons are left behind as well as twins just three years old. The twins, a boy and a girl, are left in the care of their paternal grandparents who live in town. The older boys retreat to the old family home in the hills to eke out a living and make their way as best they can. The youngest boy, now a grown man, is the narrator of this family saga. He is the ‘lucky, unlucky’. Lucky to be able to be raised in town by his grandparents. Unlucky in the circumstances that bring this about. But ‘lucky, unlucky’ might also describe the whole history of the Scottish Highlanders. And their collective sad tale is intermingled with the tale of this specific family of MacDonalds.

Alistair MacLeod’s writing is both sentimental and hard. He does not hide from the harshness of the lives of his subjects. Gruelling work, unexpected death, and violence abound. But so do songs and repeated adages, advice to this disparate and sometimes desperate clan. A counterpuntal narrative structure takes us from the late 20th century back through the lore to the late 18th century and forward again. And always the bond of blood remains stronger than any distance or difference that might arise.

At times the narrative structure betrays the author. It tends towards repetition, like a refrain in a long song, which becomes less palatable as the story transitions from archetype to particular. The more we know about the narrator and his siblings the less the repetitions work emotionally. They begin to feel thumping, as when in a raucous sing-along someone needs to be stomping a beat in order to keep the verse moving forward. And there is something curious about familial and national history that concentrates almost entirely on the tragic events and has very little to say of love or personal desire and achievement or thoughts beyond the most basic blood bonds. I kept wondering whether this was a peculiarity of MacLeod’s writing or a Scottish trait coming through. In either case it begins to tire the reader, I think. Or maybe I’m just inherently suspicious of writing that tugs on such nationalist and clannish heartstrings.

21. CivilWarLand in Bad Decline by George Saunders

The most astonishing thing about this collection of six short stories and one novella is that it is George Saunder’s first. Every story here is so well-formed, and well-judged in tone and diction that you could be forgiven for suspecting that this must be a writer in mid-career. All of the characteristic Saunders motifs are here: the dystopian future which is slightly askew; the focus on the minutiae of labour versus the often bug-eyed view of management; the transactional nature of sex and sin and remorse; the demands of family, even if one’s family is extreme or excessive. Curiously, a number of the stories invoke spectral characters who haunt the living listlessly, as though they’ve just got no where else to go. And that itself is its own special form of atheism.

Although Saunders’ dystopias are typically violent, debasing, and hopeless, he balances these tendencies with characters who rise above their environments, achieving something even if we can’t always be sure precisely what. “Isabelle” and “Offloading for Mrs. Schwartz” and the novella, “Bounty”, end redemptively (even if not always believably). And even stories such as the titular “CivilWarLand in Bad Decline” which falls back on violent spectral hauntings has a purgatorial air. The main character here never stops striving to do better and, more important, to do what is right.

Of course it is the remarkably rendered workplaces in these strange environments that rightly garner Saunders accolades. He has a near pitch-perfect ear for the underdog, beaten down by the system and by circumstance, but working however grindingly within the bounds of economic forces that allow no escape and no survival. The question to ask, I suppose, is why these stories don’t seem even bleaker than they are on the surface? Why doesn’t this meld into Cormac McCarthy territory? That it doesn’t, I assume, must have something to do with Saunders’ underlying optimism. Or with the natural tendency to optimism of his readers.

Always worth reading.

22. The Emperor of Paris by C.S. Richardson

Paris at the turn of the century. The previous century. Love is in the air. Love and the aroma of sourdough and baguette, a boulangerie in the 8th arrondissement. Monsieur Emile Notre-Dame is said to be the thinnest baker in Paris. Together with his son, Octavio, he has a special talent for telling a tale. Show him a picture, give him one word, and he will craft a story out of thin air.

This is a whirlwind of a story that flashes between glimpses of Emile and his son, a bouquiniste name Henri, a destitute painter named Jacob, and a beautiful young woman named Isabeau who works at The Louvre. The interweaving is so light and complex — like a impressionist painting — but also so multifaceted — like a cubist painting, perhaps — that you are forced almost to race along, breathless, in hopes of finding some sort of solid ground before you put the book down, fearful that it might all just blow away if you close the covers. It is both frustrating and charming, and I don’t recommend it for other writers, even though C.S. Richardson handles it beautifully.

The slight reservation I might have is that such an airy confection works against the emotional involvement of the reader. So even though there is surely a great love story unfolding, it is impossible to fully empathize with the key figures. And that the resolution is deferred and deferred and delayed and delayed right up to the final page only accentuates this effect. Thus I find myself both enjoying this novel at the same time as wishing that I could have loved it even more. But perhaps we have to make do with the technical feat that Richardson has achieved and applaud that in itself. Which I do. Gently recommended.

23. The Tale of Don l'Orignal by Antonine Maillet

“Godalmightyhellfire,” says Don l’Orignal, patriarch of the tiny hay-covered Flea Island. He says it often. And his chief counsellors — La Sagouine, La Sainte, the heroic Noume, and Citrouille — are equally colourful. Quick to anger, quick to fall in love, quick to celebrate victories and quick to despair. They flit about in the manner of their namesakes (and possible ancestors). And they definitely pester, irritate, and enrage their mainland compares — the Banker, the Milliner, the Teacher, the Merchant, the Lighthouse Keeper, and the Lady Mayor. From its first unexpected appearance off the coast, Flea Island is an affront, a challenge that must be answered. No matter what.

Antonine Maillet’s fable is delightful and unpredictable while at once feeling timeless and certain. The love between Citrouille and Adeline, archetypal star-crossed lovers, will not be denied. Nor will the ‘homeric’ battle between mainland and island. Maillet invokes many of the tropes of an epic war-torn saga even as she explodes them with bathos. In one great battle the Flea Islanders capture the ultimate prize — a keg of molasses. At some points nearly all of the Islanders are on the mainland and all of the people from the mainland are on the island. It’s topsy turvy and you can’t guess how it might all turn out.

I read the English translation and heartily recommend it. But if you are able, do make an effort to read the award-winning French original version. I’m sure you’ll find it Godalmightyhellfire.

24. Island: The Collected Stories by Alistair MacLeod

You would be hard pressed to find a collection of short stories covering a span of more than thirty years with more consistent quality, intensity, burnished emotion, and progression, as the author develops and hones a talent that was more than evident even in his first published story. Alistair MacLeod mines a seam that is as remarkable for its variety as for its purity. The heirs of the Scottish highland clearances made their way to Cape Breton and generations on retain both the Gaelic and their identity through their labour and their commitment to family. Story after story recounts the bonds between fathers and sons (or daughters) and, especially, the generations overlapping as grandfathers and great-grandfathers are considered and their stories are mingled with those of their descendants.

This collection is both usefully and unfortunately organized chronically, with the dates of original publication for each story made prominent. That is useful because the reader instantly sees that even in MacLeod’s first published story, “The Boat”, he is already tremendously accomplished. But you also see that over the years his writing continues to evolve. The later stories, such as “Vision” or “Island”, are considerably more complex narratively. Yet they retain the immediacy of the “told” stories that typify MacLeod’s earlier efforts. It is slightly unfortunate, on the other hand, to have the chronology front and centre because without it I think a reader might be even more impressed at the quality of each and every story. There is hardly a sense in which this seems to be a collection of an author over the course of his career and not just a snapshot at a single remarkably productive point. But at some point you may well begin wondering what else was happening in the north american short story field during the latter third of the 20th century, and that might surprise you in comparison to what MacLeod was writing.

In some ways these stories partake of an older mode of story telling. Perhaps it is the “personal tale” aspect of so many of them, or the prominence of animals, especially dogs, or the concentration upon marriage, birth, and death. Certainly they come across as rooted in the land (or at times the sea). And that may mark them as particularly Canadian (though you might also catch a hint of Jack London in some). However, when you read them you will find yourself so tightly bound to the principal characters and what happens to them that you won’t really have room for such thoughts. Just as well, because the stories themselves are all you really need. Highly recommended.

25. Pélagie: The Return to Acadie by Antonine Maillet

The infamous deportation of the Acadians in 1755 might have been the end of a people. Dispossessed and dispersed to lands far away, to Louisiana, the Carolinas, islands of the Caribbean, and further afield, the Acadians might have disappeared altogether. But something held them together and at least part of that something must have been the tales of their forebears passed down from one generation to the next round the hearth. After fifteen years of exile, Pélagie, known as Pélagie-of-the-cart, decides that enough is enough. She will make her way back across what was to become America and up its eastern seaboard, back to Acadie. But her solid cart and six strong oxen would not make the journey alone. Gathering as many as would join her and collecting further Acadian refugees along the way, Pélagie sets out a journey that would take almost ten years. Through hardship and joy, birth and death, and adventures by the score, Pélagie keeps her spirit and the spirit of a emerging ‘people’ alive. Their shared stories and language hold them together as nothing else could. So it is fitting that this tale is told with all the joie de vivre that is evident in someone as iconic as Pélagie.

Antonine Maillet’s award-winning tale is as fresh and immediate as any that might be told to those gathered at the hearth. Your eyes will widen in amazement and trepidation at what might come next, even as Maillet allays all anxiety about the ultimate outcome through a narrative framing that sets the tale in the mouths of the descendants of those who made the journey. And virtually everyone is here, at least through name association. There are the Cormiers, the LeBlancs, the Landrys and Poiriers and more. And also, naturally, the Maillets. High adventure, of a sort, ensues. And almost always it is the women who drive events, whether it is Pélagie who leads them onward, or club-footed Célina who cures them of their ills and midwifes the next generation into being, or the wild orphan Catoune who inspires the devotion of more than one suitor.

Maillet has created a delightful tale of devotion and courage, and plenty of good humour, out of what was a shameful episode in history. Well worth reading even in this English translation. Recommended.

Ok, now I have to read this book that is in my section on Acadian history. I always wondered how, if the Acadians were exiled, so many of them still live in Cape Breton. It sounds like this book will give me an idea of the story. The names that I am researching around Isle Madame include Landry and Samson as well as the great French name of McPhee. I wonder if there is some connection with the Landry's in this story.

>70 Familyhistorian: Hi, Meg. You probably know a great deal more about all of this than I do. I've recently been reading some of the writers from Nova Scotia (and New Brunswick) as my way of prepping for a vacation in Nova Scotia later this year. Probably a guidebook or two would be useful as well, but this is more fun.

Ooh, where in Nova Scotia are you going? From what you are reading it looks like Cape Breton might be one of your destinations. Lucky Strike is a mystery set in Cape Breton with a very funny take on the regional character. I love reading about places before I go and visit them and after when I can picture where they are set.

>72 Familyhistorian: You guessed it. We'll be in Cape North for about a week. We'll also spend a week on the south shore near Lunenberg. I'm not especially looking forward to the rather long drive from southern Ontario to get there, but I'm sure I'll be glad once I'm there.

>73 RandyMetcalfe: I remember that drive but it was at the end of our cross Canada trek. Ontario went on for ever so at least you are starting part way through. If you are going in the summer time the most annoying thing is all the road construction.

26. Things Look Different in the Light and other Stories by Medardo Fraile

Over more than 50 years, Medardo Fraile perfected the brief tale. Sometimes little more than a vignette, an episode, or a scene, nevertheless his tales are unfailingly precise, capturing a mood or a moment or a single action. At times he renders these with such focused attention that one could imagine the single action occupying a whole novel. At other times the details effervesce. It’s as though he was merely describing the air itself.

The selection here, which spans his entire life’s work, is helpfully introduced with a foreword by Ali Smith. Helpful, because the reader needs to learn how to read these short pieces. They are not standard north american short stories. Nor do they fall into the camp of experimental brief fiction in the manner of Lydia Davis. They tend not to be ambitious, but neither do they withdraw from moralism. Gentle might be best term to describe them.

I found myself drawn to them, their style and form, and I hope, now that they are available in English, that Fraile’s influence will grow. Gently recommended.

27. Rise Again!: The Story of Cape Breton Island, Book One by Robert J. Morgan

It’s hard to imagine a more thorough or straightforward history of a region. Robert J. Morgan takes us from the earliest days of settlement on Cape Breton Island by the Mi’kmaq to the arrival of European fishermen and through the halting steps towards permanent settlement by the French, the Irish, and, latterly, the Scots. Morgan’s is primarily an economic and political history of the island, but he also ventures into the strategic importance of Cape Breton Island and its significance in fostering and preserving, especially, Acadian and Highland Scottish culture. This volume brings us up to the end of the 19th century leaving the more recent times for the subsequent volume.

The writing is clear and well-documented, if at times a bit dry. However, it never feels other than even handed in its presentation of the historical facts. As such I recommend it as an excellent grounder in the history of one of Canada’s most distinctive locales.

28. Play the Monster Blind: Stories by Lynn Coady

The title story in this collection, “Play the Monster Blind”, is utterly and morbidly gripping. In it, Lynn Coady displays a curious but fascinating affinity for the hulking gentle male who is nonetheless capable of near-instant violence. Her characters ooze out of the Nova Scotian bedrock. “Earthy” is almost too modest of an adjective for them. And yet they seem entirely real. Even her narrator, who naturally maintains a degree of distance, is somehow complicit. You end up thinking that this can’t possibly end well, regardless of how it does end.

Sometimes Coady presents a character sketch, as with the irrepressible Murdeena in “Jesus Christ, Murdeena”. At other times we get the slightly distanced view on local rituals, as in “A Great Man’s Passing”. But usually it is violent men that are her subject, even if that violence is usually contained by the semi-civilized rules of a sport, as in “Batter My Heart”. In all of these stories, Coady writes with clarity and passion.

Less successful, perhaps, are the stories that revolve around a set of female characters. Some of these feel uncertain. Similar incidents recur in separate stories as though Coady is feeling her way in the dark, bumping into the same objects without noticing. Or as if these are different drafts of some further story she is yet to write. The result is a somewhat uneven collection. The best stories, which tend to be those gathered towards the front of the book, set such a high standard that the weaker ones appear even weaker when set in relief. That’s unfortunate because with a bit more rigorous selection this could easily have been a first-rate collection. Thus the dangers of a prolific writer without a censorious editor. But certainly there is enough here to warrant reading more of Coady, which is what I will surely do. Gently recommended.

29. A Fraction of the Whole by Steve Toltz

The life stories of Terry Dean, his half-brother Martin Dean, and Martin’s son, Jasper, make up most of the fractions of this novel. Sometimes the first-person narrator is Martin, sometimes it is Jasper. But it really makes no difference since their voices sound exactly the same. Indeed everyone’s voice sounds the same in this lengthy but tiresome first novel. There are moments of wit and startling similes, which in isolation might suggest a novel of insight and humour. Unfortunately the whole ends up being much less than a fraction of its parts.

There is a kind of flatness in this writing, almost like a naïve painting with no perspective. Indeed the comparison might be taken further, given the distortion of the human form often found in naïve painting. Here the characters are thin and exaggerated and typically grotesque. The environment in which they live, which is ostensibly Australia (and latterly Thailand), is completely bereft of identifying marks. It might be anywhere at all. Or nowhere. As the story develops and the voice of the narrator is passed from Jasper to Martin and back to Jasper, you may get the impression that the author simply got tired of one voice at a certain point and switched to the other in order to sustain his interest, not unlike alternately standing on one leg and then the other. This might also explain the coarse peppering of the text with quotes from philosophers and writers from across the ages. Perhaps a bland stew needs such seasoning. But what it really needs is more careful cooking.

Not recommended. Not even a fraction of it.

30. Jesus' Son: Stories by Denis Johnson

Denis Johnson’s short stories set a standard in the late 20th century that has rarely been equalled. The voices of his narrators are raw, unadorned (except when wonder is the only appropriate reaction), unpretentious, and unprotected. They are typically lost young men seeking solace or oblivion in drink or drugs or sexual release. Only rarely, as with George in the much-praised “Emergency”, does a character’s goodness supervene on his situation and lack of comprehension. More often Johnson’s characters have a surfeit of venial sins which burble into the mortal. You can find them at sad dives like the Vine tavern wearing medical bracelets cheating each other out of quarters. These are not the noble poor who sometimes populate Carver stories, or the unheralded but self-believing geniuses of Kerouac. They have very few redeeming qualities and are marked only by their drive for their next hit of whatever.

The writing is spare and lean and almost always surprising. Narrative cohesion is consistently undercut. It happens so often that the reader will wonder what is the point of such unreliable narrators. Truth, perhaps, is not meant to inhere in correspondence with the world, but rather with something created through the telling. A kind of narrative truth? Certainly the lack of fidelity to what really happened does not tell against our belief in these narrators. Indeed it may speak in their favour. At any rate it is a fascinating technique that you now see widespread. Johnson was not the first to employ such a strategy, but I think he does it better than many who came before.

Apart from “Emergency”, which sparkles like the gem that it is, I would also point to “Car Crash While Hitchhiking,” “Two Men,” “Out on Bail,” “Dundun,” and “The Other Man” as especially worthy of note. But now that I’ve named nearly all of the stories in the collection, I might just as well go on and say that any of the rest would be equally well worth a read. The stories are short but many of them will stay with you a very long time. Recommended.

31. The Safety of Objects: Stories by A.M. Homes

The protagonists in A.M. Homes’ stories are nearly all slightly askew. Their situations are neat and orderly — a couple’s staycation whilst their children holiday with their grandmother; sunbathing; office work; a sleepover. The locales tend to be suburban, typically middle-class and white. But in the midst of all this predictable normalcy, the characters’ interior lives are a frightening jumble of misplaced desire and irrationality. As a result, Homes can move from the mundane to the outlandish and back in a flash. The effect is striking. But to what end?

Homes’ early stories, as found in this collection, might be a response to the prominent mode of dirty realism in the ‘90s. But for her, the grittiness lies inside. Adults become self-absorbed teenagers in the absence of their children. A man with anger management issues implodes when his routine mechanism to diffuse his pent-up anger becomes temporarily unavailable. Indeed adults seem to always be at risk of disintegration. For the young teen protagonists of stories like “Chunky in Heat,” or “A Real Doll,” pubescence borders on self-harm. And the interiors of minds or linen closets (as in “Yours Truly”) just are the arenas of action.

Curious and slightly disturbing, but riveting all the same. Gently recommended.

Some very good reviews here, Randy. I really must get some Denis Johnson on my reading list soon. You've wetted my appetite with your review of Jesus' Son.

32. At Freddie's by Penelope Fitzgerald

In post-war Britain, the theatrical school offering professional training for child actors targeting the few child roles in Shakespeare or, more often, a run in a pantomime, was practically an anachronism. Television and film did not need children who could act; they just needed cuteness. Nevertheless, Freddie’s (otherwise known as the Temple Stage School) persevered. Led by the irrepressible proprietress, Freddie, the school survived through guile, charity, and outright bluff. A small cohort of teachers and staff took charge of the diminutive student body whose egos and charm more than made up for their age and size. Wise beyond their years, as a steady diet of the bard and panto is bound to make one, the child actors suffer the vicissitudes of life with appropriate tragic or comic excess.

The writing here is almost as light and ephemeral as the world in which the characters live. In essence, a series of comic set pieces punctuate the novel. In most, Freddie herself — ancient beyond years and surprisingly knowledgeable of the criminal underbelly of London’s east end as well as, oddly, obscure Italian dialects — takes centre stage. Seemingly on the edges of these stagey moments life continues to happen: love, death, small victories, and numerous defeats. It can seem inconsequential. So much so that the final moments of the novel may catch you entirely by surprise. As poignant and rich with existential anguish as Joyce’s ‘The Dead’. Breathtaking.

Always highly recommended.

>81 rosalita: Thanks Julia. If you get the chance, there is a great reading of "Emergency" by Tobias Wolff on The New Yorker fiction podcast. Wolff brings the story to life.

33. Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout

The titular heroine of this novel-as-a-series-of-short-stories only appears glancingly toward the end of the opening quietly powerful story, “Pharmacy.” That story focuses instead on Henry Kitteridge, who is sensitive, forgiving, and somewhat stunted emotionally. It is a beautiful tale that covers a few decades and gently paints a picture of a man and a locale, a small town on the coast of Maine. Sadness abounds. As does death, conflicted emotions, a certain kind of fatalism, and a regimented isolation of one individual from the next. These motifs populate most of the stories in this collection which collectively chip away at the outline of Olive Kitteridge.

The best of the stories share the obliqueness of “Pharmacy”. I would single out“Incoming Tide,” “The Piano Player,” and “Starving.” At some point, Strout must have felt the need for a bit more directness and linearity. Thus we find a few stories with Olive front and centre. But these can have a forced quality. Not merely because in many respects Olive is unlikable. Rather because, having taken up this interesting method of telling her tale, the reader might feel as though the author has abandoned her promise, or lost her nerve. I would have preferred even more obliqueness, keeping Olive Kitteridge at the furthest reaches. But perhaps that is just a personal preference.

Certainly all of the stories here are competently written. But inevitably there will be some unevenness. Some short stories will simply work better than others, even for the best of writers. And that is part of what makes this a risky strategy for a novelist. After all, Strout never relinquishes the synoptic view. The reader will feel from the first through to the last story that the author has had this all worked out in advance. But that itself somewhat undermines the point of the partial view that the short story insists upon. And so I’m torn. The result is very good but you may come away thinking it could have been even better.

Gently recommended.

34. One For The Books by Joe Queenan

Mildly amusing. Joe Queenan focusses his gentle wit on a passion that has stayed with him from his earliest days in Philadelphia to a bedsit in Paris and on to life in Tarrytown, New York: books. Buying, reading, and keeping books. Queenan’s love for his prized possessions is clear. As are his tastes. And even more his dis-tastes. Alas for poor Middlemarch; it takes a beating here. It is one of those books that Queenan will hold on his shelf to his dying days, unloved and unread. But don’t take it to heart. Joe Queenan is always on the verge of poking fun, and just as often makes himself, and his peculiar habits, the butt of his jibes. Perhaps Eliot will catch his fancy in a year or two.

Although presented in the form of chapters, this book has the feel of newspaper columns that have been reconstituted into a new whole. The result is that there is a fair bit of repetition. But that might not bother a reader who is merely dipping into the book rather than reading it straight through. The other unintended challenge to the reader comes from a recurring theme. Queenan regularly declares that some books are not worth reading. He details many that do not live up to one or more of his criteria. But the question on many readers’ minds will be whether this book itself would be worth reading for Queenan. I suspect it wouldn’t. However that is no bar to anyone else enjoying it.

Although his humour is less cutting, less painful, less extreme than many other journalistic humorists, there remains much to enjoy here. Dip in at your leisure.

It has been a long time since I last posted here. The above book is the first that I have finished reading since June and it is already edging toward the end of August. So, a bit of a long summer drought. In many ways. Not that I haven't been reading on and off. (More off than on, admittedly.) I started War and Peace, and The Savage Detectives, and A House for Mr. Biswas, and a biography of Penelope Fitzgerald, and a novel in French which was a bit beyond my level but which had a great title, Le philosophe qui n'était pas sage. I just didn't finish any of them. Yet!

Life got in the way.

But I'm back reading again. Or rather, finishing reading again, even if it took a very slight book by Joe Queenan to get me off the mark. I'm hoping I can pick up the pace and still reach my goal the year, even if War and Peace is not amongst the final set (this year!).

35. Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life by Hermione Lee

Surely it is the case that the life of a writer — even a writer who primarily comes into her own late in life as was the case for Penelope Fitzgerald — is to be found in her writing. Fitzgerald did not publish her first book until she was sixty. Thereafter she rapidly rises the ranks of British writers with one enigmatic, thoughtful and typically humorous short novel after another. In less than twenty years, she was being referred to by some as the greatest living British writer. By the time of her death in April 2000, there were very few dissenters. Of course, whilst the novels, biographies (she wrote three at the outset of her ‘writing’ career), short stories and numerous reviews and other various writings may constitute ‘a life’, there can be little doubt that Penelope Fitzgerald also lived another life before her writing life began. Fortunately, or unfortunately, these lives tend to merge since a number of her early novels draw substantially on her personal experience.

Hermione Lee gives in to the temptation to read Penelope Fitzgerald’s life through her novels (as well as the biographies). So much so that in early chapters of this biography, she incorporates sizeable quotations from those early novels in order to flesh out the story that she is telling about Fitzgerald’s life during the WWII, and onwards through the 1950s and 1960s. It is a risky technique since it leads to also reading Fitzgerald’s life through the novels that do not explicitly draw upon her personal experience. And that makes it somewhat hard to judge the biographical aspect of Lee’s biography. Unlike a writer such as Jane Austen, much of Fitzgerald’s life before and outside of her writing is available to the biographer. Perhaps a literary biography would have been a better fit rather than attempting the life as a whole.

The writing here is workmanly. There are plenty of facts to report and a whole host of characters, some of whom have been worthy of biographies of their own, to introduce and engage with. And yet, at the same time, it feels thin. As though the writing were waiting for some breath of life that never quite arrives. Perhaps what I am noticing is the difference between a life treated as biography and a life as fiction. Certainly Fitzgerald’s novels never lack this breath of life. And as such I would recommend them, every one, more than this life. Indeed, what the lover of Fitzgerald’s fiction will long for here is precisely what her death makes impossible — a Fitzgeraldian treatment of her life as a whole. Failing that, we shall have to make do with what we have. And that is no small thing.

36. Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay by Elena Ferrante

Life is full of entanglements. And when two lives are as entangled as those of the protagonists of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels it becomes a moot point as to who it is that really leaves and who remains. Elena Greco has found literary success with the publication of her first novel, as well as a certain notoriety, and an enduring confidence in her power to effect change — she thinks it is positive change — in the lives of those dear to her. Her counterpart, Lila Cerullo, has found obscurity and destitution after a failed marriage, a failed love affair, and an unwanted birth. Yet, as ever, it is Lila and not Elena who seems to be in control of her own destiny. Even Elena’s marriage to a well-connected but dull academic and her new life in Florence cannot free her from the suspicion that far from escaping the mire that is her childhood neighbourhood in Naples, she is ever at risk of sinking back into petty jealousies and crude emotions that suffocated her in her youth.

The contrast between Lila and Elena is both sharper in this third novel in the series as it is more subtle. Elena is full of high politics and ideas about the class struggle, while Lila is being abused and maltreated by voracious overlords in a dismal Neapolitan factory. Elena has access to the power of the press and highly placed friends, but Lila knows that real power still lies at the sharp end of a knife. Elena is frustrated by her inability to help Lila in any meaningful way. Lila, on the other hand, desires only that Elena live the life of integrity that would somehow, in its purity, redeem Lila’s sorry and sordid present condition. But for Ferrante, all contrasts are at best momentary and reversal after reversal consistently inverts expectation and interpretation. The effect is bewildering.

At times this third novel can feel cerebral, almost passionless, as Elena self-consciously narrates the raising of her own consciousness. Have we strayed into the politics of the personal? Perhaps. But the real has its own demands and Elena’s suppression of her own passionate nature has repercussions, unlooked for but perhaps not unexpected. By the end of the novel, Elena is literally taking flight for the first time (a journey from Rome to Montpellier, in France) even as, she can’t help noticing, the floor under her feet trembles.

I remain riveted. And somewhat in awe of Ferrante’s skill at juggling huge political themes whilst rooting everything in the clinging mud of that Neapolitan neighbourhood from whence Elena and Lila sprang. Who knows what might yet flower in the remaining books in this series? I, for one, can hardly wait to read on.

37. Wittgenstein Jr by Lars Iyer

Lamentations typically have some object, some person or thing about which one is lamenting. But what would it be like to be in a state of lamentation without object, without point and possibly without end? What if, in the face of nihilism, one’s lamentations were nothing more than raindrops posing as tears? Or at least one might suspect they were. And what if the principal lamentation of “the philosopher” is whatever metaphysical impulsion it is that causes him to take on the form of “the philosopher”? This is the condition of “Wittgenstein Jr”, a don at Cambridge so labelled by his twelve disciple-like students.

This “Wittgenstein” models the original Wittgenstein more or less exactly (though these events are set in the nominal present), taking on many of Wittgenstein’s projects of logic and life, some of his mannerisms, and even, at one point, his Viennese ancestry and family history. His young disciples are undergraduates in their final year, all male, all in thrall to his curious personality. Ostensibly they are philosophy students but it is never clear what topic in philosophy they are studying with their “Wittgenstein”. And so, in the absence of concrete particulars, we are left with gnomic statements on the nature of philosophy itself, typically undercut immediately by counter statements. This “Wittgenstein” seems inordinately caught up in his own life drama. Whether he is waging war against philosophy itself or the perceived ill-will of the Cambridge dons. He is often transported into flights of rhetorical frenzy. And this begins to set him at odds with the real Wittgenstein, one of whose mantras might have been, “back to the rough ground”. Wittgenstein Jr is not Wittgenstein. And his pronouncements, though often seemingly gnomic, are not in themselves philosophy. So why do his students, some of whom seem intensely grounded, put up with his waffle?

Love. All twelve are in one way or another in love with their “Wittgenstein”. Indeed, love is the recurring theme of the story. In this modern Symposium, Wittgenstein Jr stands in for Socrates (when he is not overtly functioning as a Christ figure). However, the vicissitudes of the academic year, and the extra-curricular activities (drugs and alcohol) in which the students partake, bring about a natural wastage. Until, during the Christmas vacation, only one student remains, with whom “Wittgenstein” takes some solace, though without permanent effect.

In the end, the reader might wish for more of the wit and/or farce of Iyer’s three earlier novels, less ponderous though arguably just as profound. Or perhaps I’m just less well-disposed to fictional versions of Wittgenstein than might otherwise be the case. Certainly Iyer remains fascinating in his technique, his willingness to create a novel of ideas, and his daring to face down the weight of preconceptions that get shipped with any use of “Wittgenstein”, real or imagined, in literature. Intensely readable, momentarily thought-provoking, but perhaps not lastingly memorable.

38. The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil by George Saunders

The most remarkable thing about George Saunders’ “The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil” is that he is able to carry it off with such aplomb. And he manages it without devolving into giddiness. Rather, he is serious. Deadly serious. As perhaps all satirical allegory must be. But to “people” his satire with such fanciful creatures as the Outer and Inner Hornerites is truly inspired.

As ever, Saunders is a master of voice. His periodically (and literally) brainless Phil slips into stentorian xenophobia every time his brain falls out. Fortunately his aides re-insert his brain in quick order to keep him, roughly, sane, or at least sane enough to be getting on with. If his brain stays out too long though he risks the loss of his principal asset, his words. It is a delight to see Saunders play with this, even as he constrains the voices of the all-too-constrained Inner Hornerites. Likewise the curving linguistic arcs of the Greater Kellerites match their geographic constraints.

Was there ever any doubt that a deus ex machina would come in at the end and set things (almost) to rights? Of course there was. But Saunders makes the reshaping hands of the Creator seem almost natural. All too soon Phil’s brief and frightening reign is little more than a memory. Not that any lesson has really been learned, at least not permanently.

Briefly and frighteningly recommended.

39. May We Be Forgiven by A.M. Homes

During the course of a single year, from one Thanksgiving to the next, Harold Silver goes through a lot. Things start badly when his sister-in-law, whom he secretly covets, kisses him in the kitchen as they are cleaning up after the festive dinner. That sets something in motion, or maybe it just latches onto something that was already in motion. Within a few pages, Harold’s brother, George, commits vehicular manslaughter killing two strangers, then whilst supposedly under supervision in a hospital he walks out and makes his way home and kills his adulterous wife, Jane, after first beating his brother senseless. By now, the reader is most certainly gripping the pages of the book with both hands much like a correspondingly terrifying roller-coaster. But this is only the beginning. Better hold on tight for the ride ahead.

A.M. Homes has a remarkable ability to thrust the reader directly into the action. You can begin to feel a bit breathless and perhaps start hoping for a bit of descriptive relief or nuanced character development to take the edge off. Not happening! Homes instead turns the crank on the plot so that more and more and more stuff just keeps happening. To accomplish this, she seems entirely willing to forego any depth of character, specificity of locale, or plausibility. Harold, a typical Homes protagonist, is a bit befuddled, weighted down with an unpleasant childhood, guilt ridden but earnest, ineffectual at least initially, and, curiously, an apparent sexual magnet, though his life before these events would not have led one to expect this. Harold takes on the burden of his brother’s two young children, his dog and cat, and eventually numerous others as he works through a form of atonement perhaps. But it is atonement that gradually changes Harold himself so that by the end of his annus horribilis he is almost a different person.

The writing here is all surface. But not superficial. At times Homes brilliantly invokes the writing of others. How? By simply having Don DeLillo appear briefly as a character. Or John Cheever. It is a fascinating approach to post-modernism, I suppose. And perhaps it even works. It is hard to say. I’m prepared to accept that views on this novel might diverge drastically. For me, it almost worked and so I gently recommend it to others.

>90 RandyMetcalfe: Oh wow, a total book bullet there. I am all the way in, wanting to read this book. Great review. Thx!

40. Artful by Ali Smith

As part of a Visiting Professorship at the University of Oxford in 2012, Ali Smith presented four lectures on aspects of fiction, specifically “On time,” “On form,” “On edge,” and “On offer and on reflection.” Presented here “pretty much as they were delivered”, the lectures must have garnered much comment and a few divided opinions, due for the most part not to the arguments presented or the views expounded but rather to the manner of their presentation. Smith envelopes her lectures in a superstructure of narrative, ostensibly exploring the grief of a spouse whose academic partner has died and left a series of incomplete lectures on aspects of fiction. Smith is an accomplished writer, so it is hardly surprising that her narrative superstructure is both compelling and charged with emotion. No doubt it made for wonderful theatre for those in attendance. But does it contribute in any way to her overall thesis? I suspect that opinions in Oxford must have divided on this point and that more than a few high table dinners must have been enlivened by the ensuing debate.

For my own part, I don’t have a particular problem with Smith’s playfully artful technique. It surely serves some purpose in the mixology of forms as academic essay is blended and stirred with narrative drive. If that’s the kind of thing you like, then it works very well. Regrettably, it can also serve as a distraction from the more focused argumentative points being made in the non-narrative parts of the lectures. And there are many points here worth considering and reflecting upon. But I’m uncertain as to whether Smith herself is anxious about the points she is making. Is the narrative component a means of deflecting straightforward engagement? Is this why she places these ‘arguments’ in the voice of a dead companion? Is she disowning her theses even as she presents them?

Perhaps. Perhaps there is more going on here than I’m willing on a single reading to discern. But I think clear and thoughtful argument is rather hard to come by. Indeed, even amongst those who don’t take on narrative blending techniques, the making plain of something that is subtle and possibly important is rarely achieved. So I rather regret techniques that make the already difficult task more opaque. And so I cannot recommend this collection of essays. An interesting read, but not a thoughtful consideration on aspects of fiction that adds to our understanding.

41. Who Do You Think You Are? by Alice Munro

The novel-from-a-collection-of-short-stories form rarely produces a perfectly satisfying novel as such. Inevitably the stories vary somewhat in tone and effect. Some are more immediate, more powerful than others. Some seem to focus on minutiae, while others sweep across time and space. The form is inexact, capricious, unpredictable, and demandingly tentative. How perfect, then, that Alice Munro chooses the form for a character, Rose, who herself is in a constant state of becoming, of self doubt, full of false bravado and troubling anxiety. Rose flits one way and then the next, changing course as quickly as she changes locale (from Ontario to Vancouver and back). But always she is wondering, I suppose, as the title story suggests, who she thinks she is. Her answers vary, sometimes contradict, and ever, ever return her to her childhood in Hanratty, a town in southwestern Ontario.

Rose grows up in hard poverty in West Hanratty. From the royal beating she receives from her father in the first story, “Royal Beatings,” to the airs and persona she takes on at school to her initial plunge into falsehood in marrying a man she knows she does not love in “The Beggar Maid,” Rose is both our focus and our challenge. Munro dotes upon her, perhaps loves her as a character, but she sees her whole, flaws and all. And that honest baring of Rose’s broken sense of self is what holds us, or at least held me, riveted through her false starts at love, her disappointments, and ultimately all the way back to Hanratty, if only as an orbital fly-by. Rose is “of” Hanratty, but not bound to it and her fate, such as it is — and this includes an acknowledgement that possibly all of her actions and choices have been wrong — her fate remains her own.

There is so much here in these ten stories. And yet, you’ll feel like you’ve only just scratched the surface of who Rose is.

Highly recommended.

42. Troubling Love by Elena Ferrante

Death both ends and initiates. Here, the sudden death by drowning of the 63-year-old, Amalia, brings her tortured life to an end. But it also sets her 45-year-old oldest daughter, Delia, on a harrowing journey as she returns to the Naples of her childhood, both physically and in unwieldy memory. The city heaves, sweaty body on sweaty body, in a claustrophobia-inducing press, sometimes violent, always lustful and threatening. Delia struggles to come to grips with why her mother ended up where she did, who might have been with her, and, more important, what might have driven her, even chased her down the long years of estrangement from her brutal and brutalizing husband.

Very little is as it seems, however, the connection between Delia and Amalia is certain, not just in their shared appearance but in the history that binds them. This is writing at its harrowing best, not surprising perhaps with Elena Ferrante at the helm. Noir lighting and neo-realist melodrama clash with a frank sexual tempo that reduces women, especially, to little more than their clothes. Or frees them. The possibility exists. In either case it is a tense and sometimes uncomfortable journey that will leave you wondering where you’ve got to and whether you lost yourself along the way.

Definitely recommended.

43. 10:04 by Ben Lerner

You can’t help but be a little bit in awe of Ben Lerner’s deftness, his complex weave of images — imminent flooding that will reshape the Manhattan shoreline, the transition to fatherhood (possibly), time’s incessant beat and its echo in the past, the book he contracted to write and the book he has written — that turn in upon themselves, multiply and become something new. Frankly, you can’t help but be a little bit in awe of his vocabulary, a diction so rich and varied and sometimes abstruse that you might wonder whether he also talks this way (he does!). Some of the writing here is so measured and perfect that it constitutes a prose poem. And you will be brought to pause and think and revel, just a little bit.

The author/narrator of 10:04 is a sometimes author, not unlike Ben Lerner, who perhaps, despite his critical success as a novelist, continues to see himself as a poet, and more important to have a poet’s sensibilities or insensibilities. We follow the narrator across the course of a year from one inundating storm that wreaks havoc on the New Jersey and New York seaboard to another; bookends, if you will, that remind us of the mutability of even our seemingly most permanent cityscapes. The narrator is anxious, medically. But also existentially. He doubts himself and his comprehension, often rightly, without the surety of any fixed fulcrum from which to view change. That is a difficulty for the narrator as well as for the conceit of the novel since the oft repeated (in the novel) Hassidic story of the world to come says that, “Everything will be just as it is now, just a little different.” But what does that difference amount to if it cannot be confidently marked? Difference, on such a view, cannot be anything but perspectival, and that, inevitably, leads to the world to come being the world as it is, or was, or might yet be. To say that we have entered a liminal space would be an understatement.

Nevertheless, Lerner is able to generate an emotional bond with his reader at times that leaps across the barriers of arcane diction, post-modern anxiety about the novelistic form, and longed-for debts to prior poets. You may even experience, as the narrator does, more than one “lacrimal event,” which for the rest of us would be a tear or two.

Always worth reading, reflecting upon, then reading again. Recommended.

44. Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End by Atul Gawande

End of life decision making, even end of life discussion, is fraught with emotional, conceptual, and therapeutic challenges. However, we mortals have been dying for tens of thousands of years (indeed, all mortals must), so this can’t be a novel occurrence even if, for Atul Gawande, the death of his father brought it front and centre for him. Indeed, the death of a loved one has a tendency to focus one’s attention. Even for a practising surgeon. It certainly got Atul Gawande asking some of the right questions and learning a few things that his medical education seemed to have left unexplored.

Gawande has two directions in his survey of the practice of death in America. On the one hand, he is concerned with the patient, the father or mother or wife or son who might be facing dire ends. How they meet their ends does matter, he thinks, and their ability to meet those ends largely depends on the kind of options available to them. But it also depends on the culture in which they live. On the other hand, Gawande is concerned with his own role as a physician. How doctors deal with death, and in fact how the medical establishment deals with death, is vital to the way in which our culture (call it a western industrial democracy) equips us to face our end.

Gawande is quick to decry the medicalization of death in America. Aggressive medical interventions keep many of us alive, at least in a technical sense, beyond our capacity to shape any further meaningful existence. Sometimes this leads to extended periods of debilitation or incapacity at the end of one’s life. Frequently that means stays of some duration in care homes of varying kinds. Gawande explores the history of these and sees progress, especially in the past twenty years, in refocusing such care towards resident autonomy and quality of life.

But extension of the period of decline, the period in which we might have need of care homes, only defers the more pressing problem that Gawande has in sight. The end is still the end, and reformation of care homes doesn’t change the challenge of how we and our doctors collectively meet that end. In the second half of the text, therefore, Gawande faces that challenge more directly. And this is when Being Mortal becomes more interesting. It is also, inevitably, more poignant. The various case histories that Gawande brings forth supplement the story about how his father, also a surgeon, met his own end. What remains puzzling, perhaps, is just how unprepared Gawande and his father and mother are when the questions they face are their own.

In the end, this is more a story about Atul Gawande’s developing humanism, his recognition that his medical knowledge is limited, and that he has more to learn, perhaps always, about how to live and act as a physician and as a human being. For those looking for a philosophically rigorous approach to death and dying, there are many other fine books available.

45. We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler

As Rosemary Cooke is fond of saying, when in doubt about where to start telling your story, start in the middle. It is a time-tested technique. However, she acknowledges before the end of this story that the middle is a moveable point. It might be almost anywhere. So it turns out that “start in the middle” doesn’t really give so much guidance. In practice, the teller still has to make a choice. And that choice is largely going to determine what kind of tale he or she ends up telling. Which might lead one to ask what kind of tale Karen Joy Fowler is telling here. And that turns out not to be a simple question when your first-person narrator is vague about the facts (of her life) and even more uncertain about who she really is (as though there were some solid kernel of identity for each of us that she has not been able to access).

Certainly there is a great deal of telling in this novel. Fowler appears to have researched widely, hunks of which are deposited into the text. Prepare to learn about animal research, especially research with apes; experimental psychology, its history and flaws; animal liberation movements; and much more. That much of this information isn’t integrated into the story especially well, however, may be down to its narrator, the aforementioned Rosemary, who also regularly tells us that Fern was/is her sister. We are told this again and again. But given that the reader has such a tenuous hold on who Rosemary is, it is hardly surprising that when we do finally meet Fern we take the fact that Fern is Rosemary’s sister as just another factoid. It doesn’t register deeply. And this is not, surprisingly, due to Fern being a chimpanzee. Rather it comes out of the writing.

There are large and important themes at play in this novel. What is a human being? What are the limits of familial relationships? How ought we to behave with non-human animals? Ought there to be limits to the way in which we exploit non-human animals for scientific research of dubious merit? Important questions. But this is not the book to look for compelling answers to them, or even just a compelling story. Whether you start in the middle, the beginning, or the end.

46. The Apartment by Greg Baxter

Some really lovely writing here. Like a strange cross between Don DeLillo and William Gibson. But it works.

We follow an unnamed American ex-Navy officer hoping to lose himself, or find himself, in an unnamed wintry eastern European city. We traverse the day and the city with him and his friend, Saskia, who is helping him search for an apartment. In the course of their travels we learn about art and the advent of perspective in western visual art, architecture and the monumental difference between the renaissance and the baroque, music and the glory that is Bach’s Chaconne and the curious sources for that quintessential western musical instrument, the violin, as well as the ballistics of billiards. Death surrounds them, whether in the form of Saskia’s dead parents, or Josephina, a friend of our protagonist’s youth, the numerous deliberate and calculated deaths in the war theatre that was Iraq, or even the cemetery that abuts the building where the long sought apartment resides. Death suffuses memory and supplants it. And it cannot be bargained with.

Despite the topics canvassed, the narrative never seems to leave the intimate surroundings of our protagonist. The pace is gentle. The tone almost elegiac. And there may also be a hint of something more, something that might be found in an unlooked for possibility of love. Or not. It is far from clear.

What is clear is that Greg Baxter is an author well worth attending to. Recommended.

47. Death and the Afterlife by Samuel Scheffler

Does it matter to us whether or not humankind continues to exist after we cease to be? And if so, why? Samuel Scheffler offers a number of speculative scenarios with which to aid our thinking about these questions. In the first, although we would live out our full life, the earth and all its inhabitants will be destroyed 30 days after our death. In the second, for unexplained reasons, the entire population of the earth becomes infertile, so that although all those currently alive will live out their normal span, there will be no future generations. Scheffler thinks that in both these cases it is plausible that our commitment to values will be undermined resulting in lassitude and despair. What this shows, he thinks, is the limits of egoism. Despite what many economists and others try to tell us about our self-interest and our motivations for action, in fact there is a sense in which, for each of us, the lives of people not yet born matter more to us than our own lives. Indeed, in the absence of a “collective afterlife”, the very meaning of our current valuations falls away. So, it seems we have a reason to promote the continued preservation of humankind, even in the face of our own demise. And that, Scheffler thinks, is a pertinent observation.

The first two lectures presented here, entitled “The Afterlife (Part I)” and “The Afterlife (Part II)”, were presented as the Berkeley Tanner Lectures in 2012. To these, Professor Scheffler adds a third lecture, entitled “Fear, Death, and Confidence,” which takes the argument further, addressing the related problem raised by the late Bernard Williams of whether an eternal life would also lead to the undermining of value. Scheffler concurs but for different reasons than Williams put forward. He sees the finitude of human life as contributing fundamentally to the value we place on persons, objects and actions. And this coheres with the view presented in the “Afterlife” lectures in that it confirms our dependence on certain forms of life (an aspect of which is their mortality) and on our faith in the continuance of such a form of life long into the future (though not forever, obviously) to sustain structures of value with which we are familiar.

It is a fascinating and original approach and rightly the subject of much debate in philosophical circles. Here, four commentaries on the lectures are provided. Susan Woolf, Harry G. Frankfurt, Seana Valentine Shiffrin, and Niko Kolodny offer substantive critiques of Scheffler’s dramatic speculation. To these, Scheffler provides a response which, if not rebutting all challenges, at least makes clear that this is a discussion which will go on for some time.

It is a great pleasure to be able to read such clear and thoughtful argument. To witness, through the commentaries and response, the very essence of healthy academic philosophy in action. All of which makes it easy to recommend this volume.

48. The World to Come by Dara Horn

Sometimes a novelist is burdened by a surfeit of rich and poignant characters. It must be hard to decide which of their stories to tell, and tempting to try and tell all of them. Dara Horn succumbs to this temptation and very nearly is overwhelmed by it. If she does not quite succeed, she at least gives us numerous wonderful moments, and plenty to think about.

Ostensibly the protagonist of the novel is Benjamin Ziskind, an aging prodigy (now thirty) who, in a moment of recognition that prompts a rash act of liberation, walks out of a Chagall exhibit in New York with a small painting that he realizes used to hang in his recently deceased mother’s house. In his mind he is simply returning stolen property, but this painting’s history is much more. It is tied to a history of misery and despair for Benjamin’s recent ancestors and by association to the long history of suffering of Jewish people everywhere. The painting, we learn, had been given to Benjamin’s maternal grandfather, Boris, by Chagall himself when Chagall was teaching art at an orphanage near Malakhova. These are no ordinary orphans. They are all that remains of families destroyed during the wave of pogroms that swept through Russia in the 1920s. And Boris, whose Jewish name is also Benjamin, is one of the most tragic cases, having been rescued from an open grave in which he was hiding.

We also learn of Chagall’s friend at the orphanage, the writer known as ‘The Hidden One’, or Der Nister. His story is equally tragic. It mirrors that of a whole generation of Russian Jewish intellectuals and artists that was systematically destroyed under Stalin’s regime. Chagall ends up being just about the only one to die a natural death, having fled to Berlin in the 1920s and later further west.

But just as interesting is the story of the twin sister of Benjamin (the first Benjamin I mentioned). She is an artist like their mother had been. And she was present at the age of 12 when her mother “sold” the painting to a Russian museum whose buyer turns out to be none other than the man who was instrumental in her mother’s father’s (the other Benjamin) death.

Tragedy abounds. But not just tragedy. There is also much light and joy and numerous tales inspired by or lifted directly from Der Nister and his literary peers. These Yiddish stories feel both ancient and fresh. And they connect the characters of the surface plot with the larger story of life before birth, that is life with the angels, our preparation for, and our destination in the world to come. Curiously rich storytelling, gently recommended.

49. Self-Editing for Fiction Writers by Renni Browne and Dave King

Which is more important for the budding writer — writing or re-writing? Are they even separable? Certainly the catalyst for the latter and spur to improved execution of the former is self-editing: reading over what you have written and finding ways to improve it. In this breezy survey of things to look for when you self-edit, the two authors gently introduce such subjects as “Show and Tell,” “Point of View,” “Dialogue Mechanics,” and “Voice.” Numerous exemplars from published novels are used as well as submissions from their own workshops which demonstrate the flaws. Each chapter ends with a checklist of the important points covered therein and a few exercises for the reader to put their new editing skills to the test.

I suppose each fiction writer will find a different chapter or set of chapters that will be of most use. For me, the advice found in the early chapters - “Resist the Urge to Explain,” or RUE for short - was definitely on the mark. Likewise the frequent recommendation to read your writing aloud in order to hear its flaws is apt. I also found the penultimate chapter, “Sophistication,” which concentrates on how to avoid the tired phraseology of hacks to be interesting.

This isn’t the last book on editing that you are likely to read, but it may be a useful one.

50. The End of the Story by Lydia Davis

An unnamed woman approaching fifty struggles to complete a novel based on her relationship, fifteen years earlier, with an unnamed man, 12 years her junior, in an unnamed hilly west coast town. She has, in effect, been writing this novel since those heady days, piecing together memories, the sometimes conflicting evidence of letters and phone records, the delicate decisions concerning first-person, third-person, close to reality or completely fictitious. She could, she realizes, keep writing this novel the rest of her life, rearranging the chronology, the emotional fit, the answer she gives to her own questions which she then refutes. Love distended, obsessional yet self-involved. Is this an affair she is describing or the novel writing process itself?

This kind of emotionally distant, hyper-aware, diffident, even obscurantist novel has its own traditions. Davis embraces these and masters them. But perhaps the fact that in a long career this is her only novel may speak to the limitations of the form. Much as one can enjoy the technical brilliance (of which there is a great deal of evidence here), I think it is an open question as to whether such feats advance the form of the novel itself. To the extent that Davis depicts an unhealthy preoccupation, a soul in torment though perhaps self-inflicted, it is a though she achieves this despite the post-modern scaffolding. And that makes you wonder what else she might achieve if she approached the novel directly. For the moment though, this is the novel we have and I have no hesitation recommending it. I just hope it isn’t the end of the story.

51. 35427::Drinking Coffee Elsewhere by ZZ Packer

The eight stories in Drinking Coffee Elsewhere reveal an author finding her voice and, perhaps, revelling in its timbre. The best of these stories — I’m thinking of “Brownies,”, “Drinking Coffee Elsewhere,” and “Geese” — show remarkable poise, thoughtfulness, and trust; trust in her readers and in herself. None of the stories is especially innovative. Rather they show a young writer coming into her strength. Rightly lauded by a host of literary luminaries, she is a writer on the verge. What comes next will, I think, be truly exciting.

Packer takes on different narrative personae, but in many of her best stories in this collection the voice is of a highly intelligent black woman (whether very young or more mature) gingerly exploring the world around her, more or less successfully. Not always self-aware, the narrative voice is nonetheless urgent and beguiling. It is as though the future is just around the corner and our protagonist is determined to race forward to it rather than wait for its arrival. Inevitably this leads to situations that are unpredictable for the narrator, whether that confusion is due to the subtleties (or lack thereof) of racial demarcation, sexual orientation, or ethno-economic exoticism. When you stride out to meet the future, it often finds you unprepared and scrambling to regain your footing.

Gently recommended. And looking forward to whatever ZZ Packer decides to write next.

The Apartment sounds interesting. I've just requested it from my local library. It seems that he has another book set to be published in 2015.

>105 catarina1: Yes, I'm very much looking forward to reading Munich Airport.

52. The Lost Daughter by Elena Ferrante

Motherhood comes as naturally as air to some. To others, not so much. Leda is one of those others. Whether the fault lies in the tensions of her upbringing (it is possible that Leda’s mother also felt the unnaturalness of her state) or in some peculiar admixture of traits unique to Leda, or, a further possibility, whether the so-called naturalness of motherhood has never been more than a fiction foisted on women — whatever the case, Leda’s actions both in the past and in the present make her the subject of censure. Both public censure and private, since Leda frets upon her own unnaturalness ceaselessly but ineffectually.

Leda is at a seaside holiday taking a break from her work as an English professor in Florence. Over the course of the next few weeks she will have cause to reconsider, though not reconcile, her decisions and actions as a mother. Early in her marriage and with two young daughters, Leda determined to reclaim her personal space, even her personal destiny, and abandoned both daughters and her husband. For just over three years she had no contact with them, only to return and reclaim them. Her current solitude is due to her, now adult, daughters having left to spend time in Canada with her ex-husband. But the physical lacerations we inflict on others and ourselves are as nothing to the psychic self-punishment we mete out unknowingly. And certainly Leda’s perceptions and eventual actions on the crowded sandy shore suggest that she has not yet reconciled herself to her earlier abandonment.

This is a closely narrated study of obsession and anxious self-regard, much in keeping with Ferrante’s other early novellas. And equally stunning in its impressive control, delicate balance of public and private anxieties, and barely contained violence. Ferocious. And as always with Ferrante, highly recommended.

53. Let Me Be Frank With You by Richard Ford

“A few good words,” observes Frank Bascombe at the end of the final novella of Richard Ford’s, Let Me Be Frank With You, and “the day we have briefly shared is saved.” It summarizes Frank Bascombe’s near elegiac take on grief, death and the fear of death, and what makes life worth living. And it perfectly captures my take on Richard Ford’s latest.

For those who have followed Frank Bascombe from The Sportswriter, through Independence Day and on to The Lay of the Land, there was always one more holiday looming. The earlier novels took place, over the course of Frank’s life, at Easter, July 4th, and Thanksgiving. So it will come as no surprise that the four linked novellas, or long short stories, here mark the the last few weeks leading up to Christmas. Frank is now 68, retired, living once again in Haddam with his second wife, Sally. It is the aftermath of hurricane Sandy and the destruction that followed in its wake has peeled back the skin of The Shore. Vast amounts of real estate are destroyed, including Frank and Sally’s old house (they sold up and moved inland 8 years previous). The survivors, one way or another, are receiving grief counselling. And maybe all of us, including Frank though he denies it, are in such need. Endings are in evidence. Indeed, as Frank notes, “that things end is often the most interesting thing about them.” Frank’s end is still being postponed, though death surrounds him, suffusing even the house in which he and Sally live (due to a horrific scene that occurred there 30 years earlier), placing its determinate finger on Frank’s first wife, Ann, who has been diagnosed with Parkinson’s, and rattling its last rasp in the form of Eddie “Ole Olive” Medley, a former friend of Frank’s from the years shortly after his divorce. Only the reassuring presence of Ezekiel Lewis and those few good words of Christmas cheer and fellowship can stem the tide. It doesn’t seem like much, but it is enough.

Ford’s Bascombe has moved on from his Permanent Period to the Next Level, which is characterized as much by letting go (of friends, real estate, cares and concerns) as by Frank’s identification with his Default Self. But of course Frank can never really hold to his stated intentions. Perhaps his true essence just keeps seeping through, as Ann might say, or maybe it is just hard for someone without an essence, as Frank would claim, to hold on to things, especially things as insubstantial themselves as intentions.

It might sound odd to describe Ford’s return to Frank Bascombe as a breath of fresh air. But fresh is exactly how this feels. A few good words, indeed. Highly recommended.

54. The Heather Blazing by Colm Tóibín

Eamon Redmond’s mother died when he was a baby. Raised by his emotionally distant father, he suffers shock after shock to his sense of self as first his grandfather and then his beloved uncle pass away in one foul week. And later his father, whose eloquence and dedication as a teacher he admires greatly, suffers a debilitating stroke that renders him severely speech-impaired, the butt of jokes from his now unruly students. His father’s eventual death is perhaps the final blow. Though love, in the form of his future wife, Carmel, rescues him in part. In part, because he may be too emotionally damaged to ever fully risk himself with anyone, even his dearest love. Nevertheless life proceeds, solidifies into history, and gradually erodes to become nothing at all.

Now a high court judge toward the end of his career, Eamon is given to remembrance, especially of his youth, but also of his early efforts to woo Carmel. Over the course of three years, divided between the last day of the court term and the hurried escape to his childhood retreat at a house near (ever nearer) the encroaching sea cliff at Cush, we follow Eamon’s thoughts and his muffled emotions that protect him even as they bar him from the full and warm relations he desires with his wife, children and grandchild.

Tóibín’s writing here is measured, thoughtful, poignant. Through Eamon he connects us to the political and legal history of Ireland. But those grand themes are as but a backdrop to what it must be to be Eamon, the man, or the boy, suffering quietly and without relief. At times the writing achieves a stillness, even peace, that is like that which a fine poem can bring forth. Indeed the quietude is so pronounced that almost any action or intrusion of historical “events” seems harsh or clumsy. That’s a bit unfair since, at its best, The Heather Blazing surely marks a writer coming into his full powers. And indeed Tóibín’s later career fully justifies that estimation.

Gently recommended.

Thanks for the reviews of the Ford and Toibin books. They sound interesting and now they are on my TBR list.

>110 catarina1: The Ford "could" stand alone, but it really only makes full sense as the follow up to the three "Frank Bascombe" novels, each of which I definitely recommend.

55. The Eye of Zoltar by Jasper Fforde

Jennifer Strange is back. And she’s on a search. A mission. Oh, what the heck, let’s just agree that she’s on a quest (but don’t tell the International Questing Federation because she doesn’t have a licence). Jennifer, still a teen orphan, still the manager of the Kazam house of enchantment, still hoping the young wizard, Perkins, will work up the courage to ask her on a date, still protecting the dragons, and still saving the day regardless of the Fatality Index for whichever search, or mission, or, yes, quest, on which she is engaged. Jennifer and her intrepid companions must find the legendary graveyard of the flying leviathans, track down the flying Pirate Wolff, procure the Eye of Zoltar (a huge ruby with dramatic magical power), and negotiate the release of the Once Magnificent Boo, all while guarding a spoilt princess and fighting an army of empty suits. And there she was pretending it wasn’t a quest!

Jasper Fforde is fully on form in this third novel of The Last Dragonslayer Series. The pace is frenetic, the puns are preposterous, the losses are huge (well, what do you expect with a 50% Fatality Index), but Jennifer is never less than up to the task. Admittedly there are times when she begins to sound a bit Thursday Next-ish, and, yes, what with the wizarding and strange lands and weird stuff, Terry Practhett would do well to eye Fforde nervously, but in the end it’s really all just about fun. Feel free to join the ride, but only if you take full responsibility given the advance warning of the Fatality Index. Oh, and it ends with no doubt whatsoever that there will be another novel in the series coming along soon. Well, there’s got to be.

Gently recommended for fun if you’ve previously enjoyed other Jasper Fforde titles.

56. The Ask by Sam Lipsyte

Milo Burke is a development officer at a third tier university. His job is to set up potential donors for “the ask”, and the bigger the ask the better. Unfortunately Milo isn’t very good at his job. And he isn’t very good at any else either — his marriage, his role as a father, his painting, his friendships, his relationship with his mom. Things aren’t good for Milo and they are about to get much worse.

Fortunately for Milo this is Chucklit. So Milo is bound to have old friends with oodles of cash. He has women who find him funny and possibly attractive, though not as attractive as he finds them. His problems, such as they are, are really other people’s problems — his cheating wife, his looney mother, his rapacious employers, his manipulative friends. Milo may be a sad sack, but at least none of it is his fault. And even the bits that are his fault, he can simply own them. Yes he is bitter at others and himself. Yes he is probably an alcoholic. Yes he is a misogynist. But we all still love him, right?

No, we don’t.

At one point Milo’s friend wants to relate something to him in the form of a story. Milo’s asks if he couldn’t just tell it to him in the form of a joke instead. And that pretty much sums up both Milo and this book. For me, it was too much to ask.

57. Married Love by Tessa Hadley

The twelve stories collected in Tessa Hadley’s Married Love are carefully observed and, at times, subtle. They tend toward interiors. Lives of middle-class (or aspirationally middle-class) English women and, sometimes, men. Although the decades in which the stories take place vary across the 20th century, the tone is remarkably similar. Indeed, except in special cases, the voice of markedly different characters, even across different stories sounds very much the same. However, it is just those special cases that reveal Tessa Hadley as a writer of significance and almost unsettling calm.

The title story, “Married Love”, stands out, while following it closely in intensity are, “A Mouthful of Cut Glass”, “In the Country”, and “Because the Night”. These are unsentimental accounts of insistent lives. An inner something, possibly fire, drives the main character in each. I found them curious without being riveting. Sometimes it is as though the writing is on the verge of being bold and daring and then pulls back. Call it reticence, a very English demeanour.

58. The Accidental by Ali Smith

A family, fractured and potentially disintegrating, takes a holiday home in Norfolk for the summer. Eve is failing to work on her next fictionalized biography. Michael is successfully working on his next meaningless affair at the university. Magnus is dealing with his guilt over the provoked suicide of a girl in his school. Astrid is on the verge of puberty or madness, or both if they aren’t distinguishable. Four isolated and damaged individuals. And each of them will have their lives turned upside down by the arrival Amber. But is she an accidental visitor whose car has run into difficulty, or is she a deliberate intervention? Or is she something altogether extraordinary? Well, that last one is certain though just how far out of the ordinary remains unclear.

Ali Smith traces Amber’s impact on each of her main characters in turn. And since they each lead such oppressively interior lives, closed off from the light of understanding or shared concern, Amber can be substantially different for each of them. And for each of them, she is just what they need, more or less. She rescues Magnus from his morbid guilty self-concern which risks leading him down the same path as his former classmate. She expands Astrid’s view outward from the narrowing lens of her dv camera into a world of humour and joy. She disdains Michael’s advances but gives him the opportunity to revel in a bit of unrequited lust, for a change. And for Eve? She knocks her on her head and challenges her inauthentic existence.

Amber’s interactions go through three iterations: beginning, middle, and end. These twelve studies are bracketed by a possible origin story for Amber in a startling procreation exercise at the Alhambra Picture Palace. But what is the connection between the flickering images on the screen, the fictive reality of Eve’s own origins, and the transformative power of accident?

Fascinating to read, even if I’m not entirely certain that it succeeds as a whole. But certainly recommended.

59. Bento's Sketchbook by John Berger

Ruminative. Almost languid. John Berger considers narrative and pictorial expression, the effort to call attention and the effect of seeing. Drawing from events in his life, his reading, his life-long study of art, Berger juxtaposes his reflections with numerous ink drawings. And interspersed throughout the text are excerpts from Baruch Spinoza’s writings, principally his Ethics. The effect is a gentle but thoughtful journey into Berger’s very humane understanding of art and life.

The Spinoza extracts, which might appear gnomic even if they were not presented out of context as they are here, form a running challenge for Berger. Spinoza, ascetic by choice or necessity (he lived in abject poverty), is nevertheless the great rationalist of 17th century thought. Although rumoured to have also drawn and painted, none of his artwork survives. In part, Berger imagines his own ink drawings filling in for those Spinoza might have attempted.

This is not a work of philosophical commentary on Spinoza. Nor is it straightforwardly an argumentative essay, though Berger does tend toward severe demarcations of categories and strong declarations. Rather the work stands as a whole — more like an artwork itself than anything else. And as such it can be enjoyed, used to prompt reflections of your own, and patiently pondered. And thus, gently recommended.

Great review of The Accidental, Randy. Yours is the only review I've read that makes me want to read it soon.

>117 kidzdoc: Thanks, Darryl. The Accidental was the first of Smith's novels that I've read. But it won't be the last.

60. The Verificationist by Donald Antrim

Colleagues from the Krakower Institute gather at an all-night Pancake House for a semi-annual evening of social bonding and bonhomie. Psychoanalytical academics and therapists all, the relations, inter-relations, power dynamics, and psycho-sexual tension between them is bound to be layered with meanings, conscious, unconscious, or subconscious. And at the centre of these, undoubtedly, is Tom, who instigated this practice and who struggles to free himself from the gravity of life, and indeed from gravity itself. In a fit of pique, Tom attempts to initiate a food fight amongst his colleagues. He is restrained, forcibly, by the burly Dr Bernhardt, whose muscular arms encircling him seem to give Tom the power of flight. Thereafter, Tom floats above the patrons of the Pancake House, observing, reflecting, astrally engaging, and, effectively, transforming himself. It’s not your usual pancakes and sausage. It’s not even your usual Krakower Institute semi-annual gathering. But it’s definitely going to be an evening of import. With syrup!

Donald Antrim’s novel is at once intensely written and as light as a feather. He takes dissociative narrative to a new level. Literally. Tom’s evening of aerial introspection never puts a foot wrong (or whatever the aeronautical equivalent of that image might be). His anxiety, both sexual and constitutive, heightens his appreciation of the words and actions of his peers even as it undermines his self-understanding. He is ungrounded. Again, literally. And his flights of fancy have a tendency to become flights of fancy. Flights which carry others in their wake — the young waitress, Rebecca; his alcoholic yet respected colleague, Sherwin Lang; Sherwin’s British paramour, Leslie. But even those who do not join Tom and the others above the ground are nonetheless released from their usual constraints, joining a seeming Bacchic Rite of Spring that can end only with transcendence, in one form or another, for its instigator.

A strange and yet compelling narrative. Gently recommended for those prepared to take flight.

61. Genesis by Bernard Beckett

Bernard Beckett takes the novel of ideas and crystallizes it as a novel of Idea. Working with the conceit of a final oral examination, Beckett presents Anaximander — Anax for short — in dialogue with her three examiners on her specialist subject, the life of Adam Forde. The examination takes place over five hours with brief intermissions when Anax is let out into another room. It opens with Anax being asked about pre-history, how the world was before the arrival of Adam. It was a world rigidly ordered, a Plato’s Republic, cut off from the rest of world, which was disintegrating due to fractious wars and plagues, by huge sea fences and eternal vigilance. Adam is a problem for this world — intelligent enough to be of the Philosopher class, physically robust enough to be of the Soldier class, and definitely with a will of his own. Adam’s actions precipitate a massive transformation which eventually leads to the Great War and the peace that followed, a peace which Anax does not take for granted.

Although the first section of the novel seems stiff in its presentation of history and explanation of a society based on Plato’s imagined republic, thereafter it becomes more philosophically interesting. Adam, captured after his early action, is forced to spend his remaining days in the company of Art, the first serious contender for Artificial Intelligence. Their argument lasts for months. In the process they canvass much of the philosophical history of debate around AI, from the Turing test to the Chinese Room to the role that mortality plays in making us human. It is a lively journey and Beckett deserves praise for never letting it seem well trodden. Readers of this novel who have not yet encountered serious philosophical discussion of these issues (which I imagine would be true of much of the intended YA audience) will find Adam and Art fascinating. And any teacher using the novel to spark discussion in her class might find herself overrun with the enthusiasm it might engender.

Does it work as a novel? Yes and no. As a speculative fiction that turns on one central idea and culminates in a well-concealed twist ending, it is thoroughly enjoyable. But it doesn’t really rise above its initial conceit. Enjoyable, for the most part, thought provoking (and not embarrassing in its presentation of the philosophical arguments), and surprising in its ending. Well worth passing on to a young person seeking a bit of mental stimulation. Or enjoying yourself when they aren’t looking.

62. Someone To Watch Over Me by Richard Bausch

At their best, the stories of Richard Bausch capture lives in extreme situations, which doesn’t always show people at their best but often scrapes away whatever masks we wear and reveals truths, beautiful or ugly. Of course an extreme situation need not be one of violence, though it is in “Valor,” “Fatality,” and “Two Altercations.” It might be a dinner at a fine restaurant celebrating a couple’s first anniversary, as in the title story, “Someone to Watch Over Me.” The latter situation becomes extreme if the ancillaries are just right, and in this case they most definitely are. This story is especially fascinating because our sympathies are almost entirely with one character through much of the story but then somehow begin to shift until by the end they are almost entirely with the other character. That’s a remarkable feat. But just one of many that arise in this fine collection.

I’d like to say that every story here is exceptional, but of course even in a fine collection some will strike different readers as more exceptional than others. For me, apart from the title story, the two that stood out most were “Glass Meadow” and “Par.” The latter, in particular, has a very weak central character, deliberately so. You might suppose that might make the story collapse in upon itself. It doesn’t. Here Bausch takes his weak character through a kind of dark night of the soul (a recurring theme, perhaps). And the character emerges intact, altered surely but intact.

I might have chosen “Nobody in Hollywood”, the final story in the collection, as my favourite. But that story (exceptional though it is) is so different from those that precede it that it almost feels like it should be in a different book. Or, perhaps a better way of looking at it, it suggests that there is much more to come from this writer, all of it well worth reading.

63. Everything Will Be All Right by Tessa Hadley

A novel that spans more than fifty years of lived experience, unless it is bound to a singular protagonist, will need to focus on first one individual and then another and then another. Who the author chooses to put principally in our gaze becomes as significant, at times, as what they end up saying and doing. Here, Tessa Hadley traces a line through a series of women, mother to daughter, through four generations. But of course over that many generations there will also be a host of other candidates, in this case also mostly women, who might have been equally worthy of further attention. And likewise there will be themes that take on the centre stage while others just as enticing wait patiently off-stage. Sometimes these choices will coalesce into a tightly wound cord of character, action, and theme. Sometimes these choices will result in a diffuse sprawl. The latter is the case in this novel. The question is whether a bit of sprawl is a weakness in itself, especially if, as might be hinted here, life itself just does tend towards sprawl.

The women catching Tessa Hadley’s eye begin with Lil, whose husband died on the beaches during the disaster that was Dunkirk. Lil’s oldest daughter, Joyce, the picks up the author’s gaze when she is a teenager, eventually heading off to art college and marrying one of her drawing instructors. Joyce’s daughter, Zoe, takes over for a time until we end up with Zoe’s daughter, Pearl. Each of these women has different aspirations and inclinations. They tend towards a fierce intelligence that emerges in varying forms. And although they have very different temperaments, there is an inescapable sense of sameness across them. A bit Radio 4? A bit Women’s Hour? Perhaps it’s just the curse of living in a thoroughly moderated and modulated class-bound society. How could they hope to be distinctive? And that raises a slight problem, because the women in the larger tale who really are distinctive, such as Lil’s sister Vera, are shunted off to the sidelines. Or at least it seems that way.

And how do the men fare in such a novel? Not well. Not well, at all. Across the generations, it seems like Lil, whose husband dies at Dunkirk, has just about the best that can be hoped for from a man. Even the one relationship that persists, between Joyce and Ray, shows Ray as overbearing and egotistical and, frankly, insufferable. One rather wishes that he could have met his Dunkirk as well. And that goes double for Zoe’s partner, Simon. But the one who tops them all is Vera’s husband, Dick, who totally lives up to his name.

It doesn’t sound like a recipe for a thoroughly engrossing novel, does it? And yet, I found it so. It is variable, certainly. At times the tone and level of seriousness switches into a different key, if you will, without seeming to want to sustain it. But overall it remains a colourful canvas of women, the choices some of them make, and the consequences of those choices.

64. The Other Walk: Essays by Sven Birkerts

The majority of the essays in this collection are brief, not much more than a page, just long enough for Sven Birkerts to carefully elucidate a single observation perhaps, often with an ironic counter at the end to inflect the whole into a different key. They are personal in that they are principally about his own life and sometimes the lives of those in his family. They are professional in that they frequently take the writing life as their theme. The writing life of which, presumably, the essay at hand is a resultant. They are calm and calming, measured and incremental in their measurement of experience, not sad, exactly, but reflective, even wistful. They are consistently finely written and at home with themselves.

That said, I longed throughout the first half of the book for something longer, something with more substance, in which Birkerts perhaps would test himself, push himself to attain something that didn’t come so (apparently) easily. I wondered if he risked himself in fiction, or at least turned his hand to criticism, which can be an opportunity to risk something in stating an opinion, an opinion that itself might be challenged. He doesn’t, I’m sorry to say, in this set of essays but I believe he does so elsewhere. Towards the end of the book, however, there are a few significantly longer pieces, though still not very long. In these you can see Birkerts work a seam, an extended metaphor perhaps, tirelessly. Again, it is fine writing. Very readable. And yet it doesn’t take flight, even if it hints that flight is possible.

65. Levels of Life by Julian Barnes

‘Uxorious,’ Julian Barnes insists in the final essay of this grief-bound trilogy, “describes — and always will, whatever future dictionaries may permit — a man who loves his wife.” Julian Barnes is such a man. The death of his wife, Pat Kavanagh, in 2008 plunges him into a grief that he is utterly unprepared for, though grief, he notes, like death, “is banal and unique.” In a sense, we learn nothing from the grief of others. Nevertheless, the uxorious Barnes seeks in Levels of Life to in some way memorialize the love of his life.

Curiously (and not) the first two essays in this slim volume involve lighter than air flight, the antics of 19th century balloonists, and a love that was larger than life. This is exquisitely beautiful writing — Barnes at his best. Filled with erudition, lightly worn, but oh so artful in its representation. It is the kind of writing that gives one hope for creative non-fiction. If only it could always be like this. But perhaps that is asking too much. And certainly when Barnes turns to his particular case of personal grief in the third essay, the level of artfulness diminishes significantly. It is as though the closer he gets to himself, the less he is able to sustain those airy heights. Well, that’s grief all over, isn’t it?

Warmly recommended.

66. Foreigners: stories by Stephen Finucan

The ten stories in this collection reveal a writer with a wealth of talent, a breadth of knowledge and experience, and the practical skill to deliver historical fiction, genre-esque homage, that special ex-pat sense of latent foreignness, and the traditional twist in the tail tale. It’s the kind of spread that makes you wonder whether Stephen Finucan hasn’t decided yet precisely what kind of writer he wants to be. Well, there’s no harm in that, given his youth. And in the meantime we get the benefit of a varied diet of solid fare.

Probably the best story in the collection is the title story, “Foreigners”, which captures the slight awkwardness of life in Britain for those who almost blend in but not quite. Canadians abroad, I suppose, is the underlying theme (Finucan also spent a lengthy period in England) but it is really much darker than that, entwined in grief and the various shortcomings of life. A very different Canadian experience is detailed in “An Irish Holiday”. A marriage is painfully stilted and no amount of verdant Irish countryside is going to cover up the cracks. “Casualties”, likewise, sees Canadians abroad, brothers this time, both of whose marriages are in terminal collapse. Mentioning these three stories first, however, may give the impression that Finucan is obsessing a bit on the lives of ex-pats. Not so. He is equally at home with a well-crafted historical tale of Josef Stalin’s early career, “Iosif in Love”. Or a thoroughly ghoulish cross between Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and a macabre tale from Edgar Allan Poe, “Devil Within”.

Finucan succeeds in the most challenging arena for any writer — giving you a reason to keep reading him. I was led to this collection after reading a story of his in a literary magazine. And having read these I am motivated to seek out more of Finucan’s oeuvre. Which is recommendation enough.

Great review of Levels of Life, Randy. I bought it earlier this year, so I'll have to make it a priority read for next year. Foreigners: Stories sounds interesting as well.

>126 kidzdoc: Thanks, Darryl. I seem to recall you enjoying The Sense of an Ending a while back, so I think you'll like what Barnes does here as well.

67. Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion

There was a certain time in America, or the world, when the zeitgeist was slightly ahead of its time, when no one was really aware of what was happening until long after it had already happened. At such a time, fiction takes a backseat to journalism, especially sardonic, closely observed journalism, the kind that is both all about the voice of the journalist but which, once that voice is locked down, suddenly becomes all about whatever that voice is talking about. In the mid-sixties, Joan Didion definitely had one of those voices. Whether she was writing about John Wayne, or Comrade Laski, or the waifs fluttering through San Francisco who know nothing and are desperate to keep it that way with meth or acid or pot or whatever — Joan Didion described America to itself. For good or bad.

Of course the title essay here is now so famous as to be almost unreadable as journalism. It is almost frightening in its portrayal of this lost generation of American youth. Didion is less successful, perhaps, in the five essays collected under the heading, “Personals”. It is as though by focusing too directly on herself she loses her perspective. Much better to let us see the author obliquely, around a corner, when the author’s attention is focused on something else. Two of the best essays that accomplish that are the final two in the collection, “Los Angeles Notebook” and “Goodbye to All That”. The former offers up a fragmented but entirely crisp impression of LA, the latter is almost mournful of lost youth and lost hopefulness, which perhaps is always symbolized by giving up on New York.

Didion’s writing is clean and concrete and always willing to make the jump-cut. But she herself is not naive about it. It is, or was, a product being sold. And as she notes at the end of her Preface, “writers are always selling somebody out.” And sometimes that somebody is themselves.

68. All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews

It is impossible to read this novel without an awareness of certain events in author Miriam Toews’ life badgering you with every line, with every page you turn. Some years ago Toews’ father committed suicide. Some years after that her sister followed suit. It is a harrowing reality that bombards every moment of this fictional account of the repeated, and eventually successful, suicide attempts of a brilliant pianist and her sister’s efforts to thwart this and/or contemplate the possibility of acceding to her sister’s plea and helping her. Sometimes writers are urged to write about what they know. Sometimes they should think twice.

Of course the writing here is brilliant. It effervesces. Toews’ talent tends toward the rapid fire one liner, which here fires off without pause, plunging breathlessly onward, faster and faster, through one unmitigated disaster to the next, hurtling headlong into…what? Exactly. We begin in the feverish white heat of the emergency ward and for the next 250 pages we remain at that extreme state of anxiety. It begins to feel and read as though the non-suicidal sister is losing her mind. And rightly so. And thus, it is only in the denouement, which lasts a further 60 pages, that All My Puny Sorrows begins to read like a novel.

I’m certain that Toews found great relief in writing this novel (she says as much in interviews about it). As such it serves its purpose as a kind of grief therapy. For the author. But what does the reader gain from this? Not, I think, what Toews has gained, for few if any of us will have suffered the kinds of immediate loss that she has had to face. Instead, we are offered the chance to witness her grief therapy. Sort of. But that isn’t itself therapeutic for us. And it doesn’t make for a satisfying novel either. Might it perhaps, then, at least have some value as a spur to debate over the possible legalization of assisted suicide? I fear that is precisely how the book has been embraced in the literary community, and it is a mistake. Toews’ private grief made public is not a good grounding for a discussion on the rationality of suicide.

For my part, I think Toews is a wonderful writer. She has an immense talent. It is sad that her life is filled with almost Greek-like tragedy. Suitable material for weeping and the gnashing of teeth. Which would be a perfectly reasonable response. However, the principal characters in Greek tragedies don’t overcome their tragedies by creating art. Rather, Sophocles comes along decades later and enlightens and informs us of their tragic plight. Sadly, not recommended.

Great reviews of Slouching Toward Bethlehem and All My Puny Sorrows, Randy. Despite your negative review of the Toews I may decide to read it anyway (I almost bought it last week).

69. Elect Mr. Robinson For A Better World by Donald Antrim

Most of the sinks in Pete Robinson’s town are clogged. Maybe that’s a sign of something. But if it is, it’s merely the tip of the iceberg because there are claymore mines planted in the public park, most of the homeowners have dug bear pits or filled moats around their homes, a blood-feud has erupted between the Bensons and the Websters, and not long ago the former mayor was drawn and quartered. Fortunately, Pete’s knowledge of medieval torture practices was very much in demand. If only the school where he had taught history hadn’t been closed. But maybe he can do something about that too. That is, if he can convince his “coelacanth” wife, Meredith, to help him in his endeavours.

This is frighteningly compelling reading, which really sounds like it ought to be an allegory for something. But probably isn’t. It just sounds like an allegory because it is so beyond the ordinary. Even while Pete reasons, in his own mind, in a ploddingly ordinary fashion. Which might also be a sign that there is something clogged in Pete Robinson.

Donald Antrim writes with assurance and panache, and just a modicum of total craziness. Okay, maybe more than just a modicum. I found myself shaking my head as I read, yet also smiling at Antrim’s hyper controlled randomness. Hard to predict, harder to pigeon-hole, this is not whatever you might have expected in a novel. Cautiously recommended.

>130 kidzdoc: You should definitely form your own opinion of the Toews novel. I really liked her first couple of novels, but the last three have been mediocre, I think. Or maybe the early novels created higher expectations than could be realistically achieved. Though, as noted, I think there are problems unique to this latest novel.

70. Girl Meets Boy by Ali Smith

Ali Smith retells, or re-imagines, the Iphis and Ianthe tale from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, locating it in contemporary Inverness, Scotland. She breathes new life into the myth by allowing Iphis to retain his/her female nature. For Smith, there is no need for the gods to rescue this “Iphis” from the humiliation she will bring upon herself, her betrothed, and her whole village. Unlike Ovid, Smith is willing to embrace the original pairing, suitably placing it in a spectrum of pairings across this brief novel.

Anthea and Imogen, sisters from a broken home, found solace in their weekly visits to their grandparents. Their grandfather, a former acrobat with a vivid imagination and the art of tale telling, frequently teases them by claiming to have once been a girl. But then his tales are equally fanciful, or at least that is what the older sister and life-bitten realist, Imogen, thinks. Anthea, embarrassed by having been named after a television hostess, is young enough to simply let the tales embrace her. After their abandonment by their mother, it is seven year old Imogen who fills the breach. Inevitably this puts a distance between the two that only time, and their better understanding of who each of them is, can bridge.

The story then shifts to Anthea and Imogen as adults. Imogen is a “Creative”, working for a company that bottles and sells Scottish water. Although she has an outlet through her creative marketing contributions, Imogen is otherwise constricted in thought and action and emotion. When she arranges for Anthea to join the firm, she has no idea that it will trigger a cascade of events. Anthea will turn everything around. Mostly herself, or rather her sexual orientation, but this primarily through standing still and being open to the wonder that is Robin, a beautiful young activist. Imogen will change as well, though it is a moot point whether she changes more or less than her sister.

The writing here is inventive and fresh. Both sisters have very clear and differing voices. But the language of both jumps up an octave when they, separately, fall in love. Love, it turns out, is the true driving force here. Smith pours liquid joy into their reactions to their beloveds. Of course this is merely a brief tale, but it reads beautifully and stands well on its own. Recommended.

Merry Christmas, Randy! Thanks for that great review of Girl Meets Boy; I'll add it to my wish list.

I'll probably read How to Be Both by Ali Smith this weekend. Have you read it?

>134 kidzdoc: Hi Darryl, and Merry Christmas to you too! I haven't read How to be Both yet but it will be on my list for the new year, as will the rest of Smith's oeuvre. Now I wonder whether Santa may have brought me any other books to put on my tbr list. I'd better go check. Have a lovely time today and all the best in the New Year.

>135 RandyMetcalfe: Thanks, Randy!

71. The Cellist of Sarajevo by Steven Galloway

Twenty-two civilians waiting in line to buy bread in a market in Sarajevo are killed by shells from the surrounding hills. Dozens more are wounded. It isn’t the largest single war crime in the long siege of the city. Just another one of many. But one of the effects of this atrocity is that a fine musician, a cellist who has witnessed the death of his friends and neighbours, decides to respond in the only way available to him. Each day, for twenty-two days, he will set up his chair in the crater that was left by the shells and perform Albinoni’s Adagio, a lament for each victim. It is a small gesture but a very human one. And it is not the only way. This ravaged city that was left to its fate for so long by the international community still has individuals in it who remember what it is to be human. The novel follows three of these other individuals over the course of the cellist’s multi-day concert of grief. Their actions, unsung and unrecorded, affirm the impulse that motivates the cellist. And, at our best, each of us.

Of course this is a novel overwritten with sentimental affection that tugs at the heartstrings. In a way, Galloway, is playing us and our emotions as much as his cellist is manipulating his cello. What’s surprising, however, is that it doesn’t feel as though we are being abused. We want to feel and to believe that there is basic human goodness in most if not all of us, but most of all in ourselves. Galloway gives us what we want. The question is whether he gives us anything else.

This is not a novel that will clarify or enlighten readers on the nature of the internecine conflict that arose in the disintegration of Yugoslavia. Indeed, Galloway could just as easily have made this a nameless city under siege. Although the real conflict was riven with ethnic discord (latent or created), there is almost no evidence here of ethnicity, nothing that would distinguish any of the actors in this drama from anyone else. Denatured, the conflict becomes almost Kafka-esque. It is simply conflict. And the response of the individuals under siege, especially those we follow closely here, is just a set of possible responses which in this case are ones that affirm our and their humanity.

The writing is clean and full of pace. It reads almost like a thriller. We move with our three separate protagonists, experiencing roughly what they experience, including the anguish of decision as they struggle to be the good person they are at heart, even if that will involve their death. Again, that could come across as emotionally manipulative, but in the hands of a writer as competent as Steven Galloway, we are conditioned to collude with our own manipulation. And that is no small feat, even if the goal here — our affirmation that we too are good human beings — is not a challenging one for the author to get us to concede. Nevertheless, a writer with talent whose other works I would be willing to read.

72. The Journey Prize Stories 26 compiled by The Journey Prize Stories compiled by Steven W. Beattie, Craig Davidson and Saleema Nawaz

Each year the best short stories published in Canadian literary journals and magazines are collected together and compete for the $10,000 Journey Prize. The stories this year, 2014, canvas topics ranging from the identity politics to crime and punishment. There are relatively few experimental stories this year; perhaps only Julie Roorda’s “How to Tell if Your Frog Is Dead” would qualify. Most of the selected stories are more traditional, more linear, more staid, more predictable (maybe) than in other years. Yet you would be hard pressed to find a single story here that isn’t solidly written and taut in line and theme. Though perhaps that is unsurprising in any “best of” collection.

For me the standout stories included the always remarkable Kevin Hardcastle with his gritty realist tale of the life of an RCMP officer in a close knit town in northern Alberta, “Old Man Marchuk”. I also liked Jeremy Lanaway’s “Downturn”, which was also suitably grim at least in an economic sense. And on a lighter side, but very deft, I liked Nancy Jo Cullen’s “Hashtag Maggie Vandermeer”.

Maybe not the best of recent years for the Journey Prize, but always worth a read.

As I don't think I will finish any more books this year, I'll post my top picks from 2014 now.

Five best reads of 2014

Let Me Be Frank With You by Richard Ford - a few good words that sum up Ford's long running character's (Frank Bascombe) take on grief, death and the fear of death, and what makes life worth living.
Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay by Elena Ferrante - the continuing story of the entangled and contrasting lives of two brilliant friends, Lila and Elena.
10:04 by Ben Lerner - it's "the world just as it is now, but a little different", the difference being Ben Lerner's wondrous prose.
Jesus' Son: Stories by Denis Johnson - a classic collection of stories that established Johnson as one of the great short story writers of the late 20th century.
The Verificationist: A Novel by Donald Antrim - at once intensely written and as light a feather, this novel takes dissociative narrative to a new level.

I didn't reach my goal this year, but I did read some truly excellent books (as well as some stinkers). My personal reading got side-tracked during the summer months, which I spent driving hours each day to hospitals, often with my father, as he spent every day for four months at my mother's bedside. She greatly enjoyed being read to, so that is what we did to ease her fears and pass the time. She passed away at the beginning of September.

My thanks to all who visited my thread this year. I've enjoyed your comments. And even though I haven't put comments on many other threads, rest assured that I've scanned them all and paused to read each of your reviews, many of which spurred new reading choices for me.

Very nice year end summary, Randy. I'm sorry to hear about your mother's illness and passing, and I hope that 2015 is a better year for you.

>140 kidzdoc: Thanks, Darryl. I'm sure 2015 will be an improvement.