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[07/10/19/22:48] |
It's time for another thrilling installment of Books I Read This Week!
Please note that the size of these installments does not infer any particular preternatural capacity for reading quickly; simply that given that I have approximately an hour to read on the way to work, I abstain from taking along any book in which I have fewer than eighty or so pages to go, as I will finish part way. Thus, I pass long periods without finishing a book, and then shoot off the last hundred pages of several in quick succession.
Quarantine - Jim Crace
Jim Crace is a brilliant. Did you know he was British? After starting with The Pest House, a narrative of attempting to survive in the post-apocalyptic ruins of the United States, I simply assumed he was a southern Gothic writer of Missouri, lonely in the desert with big boots and a hat. Apparently, the man is British. Which has little bearing on this novel a tale of a merchant and a messiah and their companions in the Judean desert. It was all going wonderfully - Musa, the merchant, is a marvelously sadistic character, with his astounding skill at cruelty early on laid bare through the fear of his wife that he will survive a mortal illness - after his real appearance, perhaps the most menacing character I've read since Judge Holden.
Then Jesus showed up.
You can see how this would worry me, yes? Jesus never makes things better. If I got a WWJD bracelet (sure, they may be passe among the "come the rapture, fuck you" crowd, but they still play for a laugh), the answer would be "ruin modern fiction." But this is a character far more nuanced than most, far more sophisticated. The narrative considers Jesus mostly an aside, being about the interactions of Satan cast as the mercantalist and man as his victim - and it works beautifully. I say this wholeheartedly as an antitheist: this book about Jesus is awesome.
Paul Auster - Moon Palace
I do, of course, feel that Paul Auster can do no wrong. See the previous post for confirmation of this point. Travels in the Scriptorium took an overwrought concept and made pure gold of it, City of Glass is one of the finest novels of ideas that I have ever read, and Hand To Mouth has obviously been of major influence. But this, I feel, is his most accessible and welcoming novel. Now, of course, I haven't yet read everything he's written; but this novel is one that encapsulates all of the absurdity, all of the beauty, all of the wonder of his writing, and ties it in with a self-conscious literaryness that is stunning and beautiful. Sinking into his novel astoundingly erudite art history, he includes artists like Blakelock (Whom I maintain is brother to Bester's Jeffrey Halsyon) as major - if not plot points, symbolic points; and overall he writes something of such incredible ambiguous beauty that it can't help but break your heart. Also, if you are a nerd: this novel has Tesla. Read it!
Tony Burgess - Pontypool Changes Everything
This is close to being a fantastic novel. Let's say this: I like zombies (see my Zombie Hamlet and Cold Patrimony, my mock victorian zombie play for proof). I also like Ontario (see my continued habitation despite winter climate for proof). So logically, a novel about zombies in Ontario would be right up my alley. The shores of Lake Scugog are swarming with what is, in setting, not quite the dead; and the novel revolves around the towns of Pontypool and Ceasarea. This is one of the most gruesome books I have ever read, and the sheer physicality of the zombies is brutal to read. It is brilliant in that manner, better at conveying horror, if not terror, than anything else I have read. The problem is that this isn't really a zombie novel. It is something that bounces between metaphor, literalism, realism and surrealism faster than you can keep track of - sometimes within a chapter. There is some absolutely spectacular writing to be had here - the life of two preteen siblings is foremost as a display of real talent - but inevitably it is undermined by some absolutely incongruous thing that shakes you from the novel, so that you don't look at the narrative but instead the page, hopefully wondering that you read something wrong. It's ninety percent awesome, but those ten percent stand large.
What Maisie Knew - Henry James
This is the only book that I have ever read that accurately depicts children. It is wonderful and brilliant and I am writing a four thousand word essay on it right now. If you have never read Henry James before, read and be awed. If you have, you know pretty much what you are going to get - a paragraph of perfect prose about each sentence a character utters, and intensely internal views. Read it!
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