Category: book review

A quick note: I’ve just finished Tolstoy’s War & Peace. I’ve been reading it for just over a year – the gi-normous, anti-public-transit hardcover version of the Pevear/Volokhonsky translation – and finally read the last of the last pages last night (if that sounds awkward, the thing has an Epilogue in two parts, each spanning several chapters, plus an Appendix by Tolstoy). I would’ve finished sooner had the second half of the Epilogue not consisted of an essay by the author on the philosophical/socio-historical implications of freedom vs. necessity in society.

So, yes, in the upcoming days, I will post a formal review. There shall be more book reviews in general in the coming months, seeing as those are the things which are responsible for 50% of this blog’s traffic. I’m assuming this percentage consists, in equal measure, of both curious readers-to-be and desperate students cramming for their essays/tests (Question 2a: “What are the themes in Hesse’s Siddhartha?”).

When I first noticed a series of novels in a local bookstore by a writer I’d never heard of, with a strange last name (reminiscent of Benelux origins rather than French), I proceeded to do some research – as I often do when faced with a writer I’ve discovered – to find which book I should read first. This writer was Michel Houellebecq.

I ended up picking The Elementary Particles, which I reviewed earlier this year. However, during my search I discovered – to my astonishment – that he had written a biography of H.P. Lovecraft (!)…complete with an introduction by Stephen King (!!?!). I will tell you that, even if I ended up throwing Elementary Particles across the apartment in disgust, I would still have purchased the biography. How do I put it… It’s as if Vincent Price wrote a biography of Boris Karloff, or if David Lynch wrote a biography (inevitably it would be a Faber edition, you know this) on Andrei Tarkovsky. Irresistible to this mere mortal.

In the end, though tempted on a few occasions to throw said novel across said apartment (and/or unsaid streetcar), I liked Elementary Particles. It’s a tough novel; not “tough” in a muscular, masculine sense, but rather “tough” in a mentally-I’m-squinting-because-he’s-pouring-acid-on-humanity-in-the-way-only-a-French-intellectual-can sorta way.

Back to the book at-hand. When I was a kid I read a lot of horror/mystery books, and yes, Stephen King was among them. I also recall reading H.P. Lovecraft, whose style I found to be as instantly recognizable as, say, a painting by Mondrian or Kandinsky. One only needs to read the first paragraph (or sentence) and you know it’s Lovecraft. The same instant familiarity cannot be said of many writers, whether they be pigeon-holed in lit or genre fiction. The thing is, I never really got around to reading much of Lovecraft’s work, seeing as the time at which I discovered him was a sort of indeterminate period in my teenhood, from which I have few fond memories; as often happens when you step away from darkness, you also step away from everything else that was appended to the darkness, good or bad.

Lovecraft has always been at the back of my head as a writer I wanted to read more of, so this biography served a dual purpose; not only does it have the introduction by King, but it also contains two of HPL’s “great texts” (as Houellebecq refers to them, rightly so), The Call of Cthulhu and The Whisperer in Darkness.

Indeed, King’s introduction is as predictably King-like as one familiar with his work would expect: engaging, funny, poignantly personable. And yet, when you stand back, you realise he probably just read the first twenty pages of the biography and, as they say, phoned it in. The thing is, I’ll take an introduction that’s phoned-in as long as it is two things: short and good. An introduction to a book, after all, is a like an opening-act at a rock concert; as long as their instruments are tuned and they keep an eye on the clock, I’ll clap.

The biography itself is not a traditional (read: dry, linear, boring, historicist) one. One must first understand, as I had an inkling of going in, that H.P. Lovecraft wasn’t a happy man. Nor was he likely to win a Humanitas Award for his insights into the enriching possibilities of mankind’s potential. And so, with his biography being written by Houellebecq – arguably a misanthropist’s misanthropist – the reader will have a unique opportunity: to see darkness filtered through another, somewhat sympathetic darkness.

Houellebecq does a very good job of tapping the man who was Lovecraft – his deep prejudices, his emotional and intellectual isolation from society – as well as postulating how the events of his life influenced the outcome of his work without the current populist habit of divining what isn’t known for sake of milking controversy. Lovecraft was a man who based much of what he wrote on dreams, whose one and only relationship with a woman ended with financial destitution and heartbreak. His racism leaked into the grim depths of his “weird tales” in the form of the onlooking “savages” and “half-bloods” who – particularly in The Call of Cthulhu – seemed to aid and abet the ancient evil lurking among us. Not a pretty picture in retrospect. There is also some interest in how Houellebecq calls to attention HPL’s habit of never mentioning two things in all his work: sex and finances.

And yet, while we may not wish to embrace Lovecraft the man, one cannot dismiss Lovecraft the writer. In reading The Whisperer in Darkness, arguably his masterpiece, one beholds a very seminal kind of horror; a slow, creeping alien night descending upon a remote Vermont farmhouse, revealed mostly through correspondence with the narrator, a professor of literature in Massachusetts. There is a poetry in Lovecraft’s prose, and by that I mean the ability to articulate flourished description with condensed, exacting verbiage. It is for this reason that HPL was (and is) such a seminal literary influence, not just in so-called genre circles.

I would not say Against the World, Against Life is essential reading. In fact, if you were to just read The Whisperer in Darkness or any of his other “great texts” you would be well served. However, there’s something alluring about having the life of such a tortured soul (remember that Lovecraft never lived to know his fame and fortune) rendered by someone so well-placed to plumb his depths. I suppose the question I would ask is: to what end? In this, I would say the book is not a great success, but there are nuggets of great interest for those drawn to both H.P. Lovecraft and Houellebecq alike.

H.P. Lovecraft: Against The World, Against Life, by Michel Houellebecq (ISBN:1932416188) is available at an independent bookstore near you, or online at any number of vendors.

“Dying is easy. Comedy is hard.”. Those are the apocryphal words someone once spoke on their deathbed. I would up the ante and add that “Satire is harder”.

As a writer, I’ve dabbled with satire, having only dedicated a small number of short stories to being “pure satire” (that is, not dipping in and out of some subplot for sake of levity/irony, but keeping the absurdity afloat throughout). On that note, I must continue to paraphrase others; I remember a late night classical radio announcer who was prompted to list his all-time favourite opera. I cannot recall the specific opera he listed as I’d never heard of it at the time. However, afterwards, he assuredly qualified the choice, saying “[…] Because it’s very. Very. Short.”

Satire in some respects is like opera. The shorter the better (within reason – I’m not lobbying for some new “blitz opera” or anything). The reason for this is that, if one is truly writing a “pure satire” (as I call it, noting that it does not necessarily mean “broad satire”, though I would argue that most “broad” satires are “pure” by necessity), then one has to create an entire environment that is somehow consistently out-of-whack, which also means characters who have to live in said environment. In doing so, there is always a tension between the narrative and the audience as to how long we (that is, the audience) must endure the ruse; that the “comedic absurdity” be taut enough to hold our interest, but not so complex that our suspension of disbelief becomes a claustrophobic mess.

While I wouldn’t call it a “pure satire”, Julian Barnes’ England, England is by-the-book enough to warrant leaning more in that direction than any other. It too, tends to suffer from “long opera” syndrome, ie. taking too much of a good thing and extending it into territories where the lightness (and broadness) of the satire seems incongruous to the author’s need to explore the interior drama of its protagonist.

The setup is inspired: a wealthy, eccentric industrialist – Sir Jack Pitman – conspires to one last show-stopper to top off his (slightly dubious) career. His idea: use the Isle of Wight as a tourist attraction which distills everything that England is (to the imaginations of “Top Dollar” or “Long Yen” clients; those, in the words of Pitman, interested in “Quality Leisure”), under the pretence that England proper is too large and unsightly to provide a satisfactory arena. As Sir Jack muses early in the going, England’s “tits have fallen”.

We are introduced to the protagonist, Martha Cochrane, in a prologue, who later in the book is hired onto Pitman’s planning committee. We are given a glimpse of her childhood, her streak of perfectionism/competitiveness (revealed between a jigsaw puzzle of England and her county’s yearly farm fair), and the hole left by her father’s sudden departure from the family.

The consistent conjecture throughout England, England is whether, after time, there is any substantial difference between the authentic article and the replica. This argument is addressed by several characters, from Pitman to his historical adviser (a part-time television host), to Martha – all of them, to Barnes’ credit, putting their own spin on what often becomes a profound if aesthetically controversial discussion.

In the words of a French intellectual Pitman’s team hires as a consultant: “[…] Once there was only the world, directly lived. now there is the representation – let me fracture that word, the re-presentation – of the world. It is not a substitute for that plain and primitive world, but an enhancement and enrichment, an ironisation and summation of that world. This is where we live today. A monochrome world has become Technicolor, a single croaking speaker has become wraparound sound. Is this our loss? No, it is our conquest, our victory.”

In other words, how is art imitating life any different after time than life itself? Where does its boundaries begin and end? This is ultimately illustrated in a fascinating turn in the plot as, long after the Isle is converted to a exclusive tourist destination complete with WWII fighter pilots, Robin Hood, and an actual royal presence, the actors playing seemingly stereotypical characters begin to accept their roles as real. The farmers begin to farm, Robin’s Merry Men make real demands, to the degree that a new civilization is almost formed in the process.

Yet, while I will not hesitate to point out that the first half of the novel, in particular the planning stages of what is to be called “England, England”, is satiric gold – in Sir Jack, Barnes’ has created a template of outrageous corruption who is not entirely unsympathetic – the rest of the book is a bit of a mess. First, we simply aren’t introduced to Martha Cochrane’s character – events: yes, personality: yes, history: yes – in a way that allows us to (for lack of a better word) give a shit about her anymore than the broadstroked Sir Jack, which wouldn’t be a bad thing if his character were not a duplicitous clown. Martha is given a prologue, an epilogue, and even a love interest. And while there are beautifully characteristic passages relating her inner doubts, it’s written so objectively that it seems the reader is being given access to her by proxy of the author (as opposed to the sort of intimacy one would normally expect). It’s rather like being slipped notes in class when you wish what you were getting were in the lesson itself.

England, England (ISBN: 978-0375705502) is an odd combination of broad (laugh-out-loud) satire and eloquent philosophical musing on the nature of authenticity. As a whole, it simply doesn’t work, but if you can overlook the weaknesses, the satirical side of Barnes’ world is formidable and honestly hilarious. It is available at a good independently-owned bookstore near you, or online from any number of vendors.

Yes, new(-ish) fiction, lest you all think I’m a Classics Guy. I’ve been wanting to read Cormac McCarthy for a while, having noticed his novel Blood Meridian on many Best Novels Of All Time No Go-Backs lists. Nothing like a book with the word “blood” on a best-of list – it could be written by Margaret Laurence and I’d still want to read it. Good for Cormac that he didn’t decide to call it “The Orchid Parasol” or something more ubiquitously “literary”. In any case, I have still to read Blood Meridian. However, I did get The Road, McCarthy’s latest book, for my birthday in November, so I figured it would be a good introduction to his work.

I remember, a while back, seeing a hardcover edition sitting rather dejectedly in Balfour Books (one of the best used bookstores in Toronto). I asked the person at the counter: “Is that new?”. “Yes.” he said. I was surprised, knowing then that McCarthy was a respected author, or at least his previous work was respected. “It’s really depressing.” he said, answering whether he’d read it. And you know, looking at the cover (which, yes, one should not necessarily judge a book by), which is all black with bleak lettering, I thought to myself: he’s probably right.

Flash-forward to 2007: a lady on television whose name starts with “O” picks it for her influential “reading club”. Suddenly, The Road, depressing or not, is receiving the sort of attention that poor little hardcover at Balfour couldn’t have imagined. Next thing you know, there’s a major film being released, based on McCarthy’s No Country For Old Men. In other words, his exposure went from zero (or “obscure”, in the mainstream sense) to sixty (recognized by-name in the mainstream, though I doubt he’s signing autographs for people stopping him on the street). While not trying to suggest the end result of McCarthy’s career is that I got The Road as a birthday present, it is a rather convenient way for me to spin this into a review.

The Road is set in a post-apocalyptic world: something happened a few years back which levelled civilization. What is left are abandoned buildings, ash-strewn landscapes, corpses, and a handful of survivors. The book concerns a man and his young son (whose names we never know) pushing a grocery cart with all of their belongings down a road, heading south to where the father hopes there is warmth, food, and perhaps life. They find sustenance wherever it is available, in whatever form, but more often than not push-on while fighting starvation. The father has binoculars, which he uses to scout the road ahead: for others. In this environment, as he tells his son, there are good guys and bad guys. For them, he carries a pistol. With only a couple of bullets remaining, the gun is intended to ward off scavengers, but the father comes to realise that, if it looks like they can’t survive, it may be necessary to use it on themselves.

Aside from their single-minded determination to keep moving south, above everything else is the father’s need to protect and provide for his son. There is a tragic necessity on every page of The Road, for the father to teach his son right from wrong, good from bad…and in turn, despite the savage necessities that happen upon them, his son is more often the one who inspires his conscience. When the father sleeps, we see his dreams – glimpses of a life before catastrophe. When he lies awake, watching over his son, he meditates on the brutal choices that lie ahead for them.

There are two profound fears expressed in The Road: first and primary is the spectre of other survivors. People roam about, often in small groups, killing others. The father and son spend much of their time hiding in the snowy woods, building fires out of plain sight to avoid being discovered by survivors. Looking for their clothing. For food. On this last point, there are passages in the book that are about as unsettling as one will ever read. The second fear, a more existential one, is one of separation and the question of how someone who spent most of their life in a settled world can teach a child born in the aftermath of its destruction, with no sense of what came before.

The Road may be depressing (especially if you’re reading it in the middle of winter, and listening to the new Radiohead CD), but it’s hard to put down. The father’s inner struggles are captivating, and the terror of not knowing what lies ahead for them is equally so. I cannot remember reading a book so quickly. McCarthy’s prose is stark. You realise that there are no apostrophes in words like don’t and can’t. Most of the book consists of clear, taught sentences that are not decorated with elaboration. Yet, there are moments of deep, poetic reflection in the narrative which, from a philosophical standpoint, convey a humanity extracted from the world as it has become. The Road manages to be both chilling, horrific, and touching, sometimes within the space of a single page. To that extent, it stands as a remarkable piece of fiction.

The Road, by Cormac McCarthy (ISBN: 978-0307265432) is available at a fine independent bookstore (used or new) near you, or online at any number of vendors.

Note: his previously-mentioned novel, Blood Meridian, is set to become a film, directed by Ridley Scott. Let me tell you, I can’t imagine anyone doing as good a job as the Cohen brothers did for No Country For Old Men. If you haven’t seen it, please do.

[3:11pm I’ve re-edited this for some factual mistakes, clarified some opinions, and added 5% more humour, all due to faulty memory and a lack of coffee – ed.]

This was one of the 500lb (226.79 kg) gorillas I had on my plate, which I was delighted to finish before the end of 2007. Delighted, I say, not necessarily because it is the best book but rather that I’ve been reading it on and off for the last three years and, like a stagnant relationship, I was looking forward to the inevitable end.

I’m an involuntary Russophile. There is no Russian blood in my family, not even neighbours. I suppose it started when I was living in Alberta, just outside of Stony Plain. It was Grade 9, and we happened to be taught Russian history. I couldn’t get enough of it. I loved it more than anything I’d had shoved down my throat to that point.

Anything I can say about Russia, I can only say as someone who’s never been there and has only read about it. In other words, I only know enough to get me in trouble. However, when I read Russian authors, hear Russian music, and see Russian art, I see a tenacious, almost ruthless, intellectual veracity. If something passionate can be dispassionately analyzed and then expressed upon, the Russians will find a way to do it definitively, the first time, and do it in such a way as to set an example for the rest of the world. When you look at Russia’s cultural contributions (art, literature, dance, film), even when produced under the worst of political/economic circumstances, the sheer quantity of excellence is devastating. I won’t even go into chess…

So, when a colleague lent me their copy of Solomon Volkov’s St. Petersburg: A Cultural History, I felt obligated to read it, if only to broaden my understanding of this cold, isolated country (as opposed to mine). Volkov is best known to music aficionados for Testamony, his controversial account of composer Dmitri Shostakovich’s life in relationship to the chilling environment set by then-ruler Josef Stalin. In St. Petersburg, Volkov tells the story of what used to be more than just the cultural capital of Russia (indeed, since the time it was forged by Peter the Great, up until when the Communists decided to uproot its status in 1918, it stood above Moscow as the nation’s crown jewel). From the inspired/tyrannical vision of Peter to build a European-styled capital, through the fall of the tsars, the rise of Communism and its slow dissolution, St. Petersburg accounts for the artists whose work boldly defined the city, its people, and who helped contribute to what Volkov puts forth as a tragic mythos.

St. Petersburg’s cultural icons are represented chapter-by-chronological chapter: Pushkin, Diaghilev, Akhmatova, Balanchine, Shostakovich, Brodsky, as well as tens (if not hundreds) of others within each part. Volkov’s effort buckles under the weight of its inclusion of *every* notable figure – the book is 624 pages long. Too long, to be honest, if you’re looking for “breezy”. I’m not sure if anyone is (or should be) looking for a “breezy” historical cultural synopsis of St. Petersburg, but this ain’t it. As a result, the book is not only exhaustive in content, but exhausting as a read. However, Volkov approaches St. Petersburg with a desire to put on paper the lives and trials of everyone who mattered – a commendable effort, if difficult to absorb for anyone who isn’t working on a thesis.

Reading how St. Petersburg was renamed Petrograd during the First World War (as a measure of anti-German sentiment), only to have it re-renamed Leningrad (regardless that Lenin couldn’t stand the place) after the rise of the Soviet Union demonstrates how the city was often cruelly abused by political authority of different stripes. For me, the horrific tragedy of what happened (not only to St. Petersburg, but to the whole of the country) after the second revolution is fascinating to read. People disappearing in the night, to be killed for treason or sent to gulags with little in the way of a trial. The state criticizing your art as “formalist” as means to bury you and any reputation you have. This is the stuff that people need to understand, not just so they understand what happened specifically during Soviet rule, but so that similar developments can be thwarted in the future.

Whether this is the book people should be reading to have an understanding of St. Petersburg’s history is another question. As mentioned, it’s extremely dense and the tone is often encyclopedic, which is not exactly easy on the eyes. Volkov is successful in portraying a parallel mythology of the city that is transmuted by history, but less successful in creating any real urgency to keep reader’s attention. Constructed in chronological chapters, the sixth and final is a mess in places – obvious copyediting errors and the sense that, structurally, it was pieced together in a rush. In the end, this is a worthy reference piece for its extensive (and sometimes first-hand) information, but I wouldn’t recommend this for someone looking for a digestible (read: concise) narrative.

St. Petersburg: A Cultural History, by Solomon Volkov (ISBN: 978-0028740522), is available at a fine independent bookseller near you, or online at various sources.

Note: I would like to go to St. Petersburg some day. If you are familiar with the city and have any tips on places to stay (or not stay), sights to see, and/or cultural anomalies that a traveller should be aware of, any information would be appreciated.

“As soon as Dawn with her rose-red fingers shone once more […]”

Homer’s Odyssey is one of the 500lb (or 226.796kg) gorillas I’ve been reading as of late. I came to it strangely. You see, eventually I want to read James Joyce’s Ulysses (a gorilla estimated to weigh a half-tonne). I knew that it was going to be a slog, so I did some research in preparation. Lo, it was suggested I read The Odyssey, as Ulysses tends to make reference to it. And thus, the Fates, if not Athena herself, recommended my next book.

The Odyssey isn’t a novel, but rather a song/poem much in the same way as the ancient epic, Gilgamesh (and if you don’t know what that is – and no, it’s not a reference to the evil magician from the Smurfs – don’t worry about it. I’m just trying to find another example that isn’t also another Greek work from the same period). It was never originally written down, but rather carried from person to person in the same way you would hand someone a CD of a song you’d like them to hear. Preserved through history as an oratorical epic, Homer’s Odyssey is an account of Odysseus, the Achaean king/hero, and his Job-like 10 year quest to return to his homeland, Ithica, having fought a decade before in the Battle of Troy (recounted in Homer’s earlier work, The Illiad).

What’s immediately engaging about the telling of The Odyssey is its surprisingly non-linear construction. We don’t start with the fall of Troy and Odysseus’ return to Ithica. Rather, we begin with the immortal goddess, Athena, seeking to undo the curse laid upon Odysseus from the earthquake god, Poseidon. From there, she confronts Odysseus’ son, Telemachus, living with his mother, Penelope, in Odysseus’ Ithican palace, now taken over with young suitors angling to wed Odysseus’ abandoned wife, laying waste to his kingdom in the process (note: the Greek gods tended not to come down and appear to mortals as themselves, but rather as fellow mortals – presumably shy folk that they are).

It is only after this substantial preamble that we – in filmic terms – cut to Odysseus, stranded on the isle of the immortal goddess, Calypso, where she has kept him for years as her…well…is “recalcitrant love-slave” applicable? Yes? Okay then. It is only through Athena’s indirect intervention that Odysseus is allowed to leave and finish his journey. Along the way, he is eventually allowed to provide the details of his painful journey since the fall of Troy: the land of the Cyclops, the Sirens, the Lotus Eaters, the thunder of Zeus, the House of Death, the nature of Poseidon’s curse. If you have any inkling or interest in swashbuckling adventure, heroic tragedy, monsters, mythology, or men transformed into sheep, there is no reason not to follow Odysseus’ tale.

Even preserved in verse-form (read: there’s half as much text on the page as in a typical novel), The Odyssey moves at a fast clip – though its thickness may intimidate you at first glance on the shelf. It’s a legendary tale that’s not like cough syrup to read – in fact, you may just find inspiration in its construction, evocativeness, and imagination.

The Odyssey, by Homer (ISBN: 978-0140268867) is available at a fine independent bookseller near you, or at any number of online sources. Please note: this review is based on the award-winning 1996 translation by Robert Fagles, who also produced a version of Homer’s Illiad. For those on the fence, there is a very readable summary of the book and its history here.