Category Archives: books

[Book Review] Ian McEwan’s Solar

07 Wednesday Apr 2010

Posted by in book review

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

I wonder if Ian McEwan has done his twelfth novel a disservice by calling it a ‘climate change novel’? It raises the stakes too high, creates the expectation of some startling insight into climate change itself – when it’s unlikely a novel can do such a thing.

I read Solar more as an amusing drama, a better version of his worst novel, Amsterdam. It’s the story of the downfall of Nobel Prize winning scientist, Michael Beard, who has done very little since he won his prize. We get three snapshots of his life in 2000, 2005 and 2009 and it’s McEwan’s skill to capture the passage of years, the shifts in time and world events. Beard is incapable of fidelity and in 2000 his fifth marriage is breaking up. In one of those McEwanian moments, a random and fatal accident suffered by one of Beard’s colleagues gives him a chance at revenge, cover-up and the stealing of valuable scientific secrets, that by the end of the novel he is developing into a lucrative alternative form of solar power.

Michael Beard is an anti-hero who reminds of Rabbit Angstrom, John Updike’s character. John Updike is one of McEwan’s favourite writers, and like Rabbit, Michael can’t control his appetite for food or women or his pettiness. In the vein of the Rabbit books, Beard gives the pulse of the time at spaced intervals; the main difference between them is that Rabbit is a car salesman while Beard is a scientist who was at least once something of a genius.

For me the novel had many moments of McEwan’s strength – startling insight into the moods and thinking of a person. I read the climate change aspect as simply a background for the exploration of an unlikeable but believable and engaging man’s downfall. Yet then on last night’s Bookclub show on ABC, Jennifer Byrne pointed out the obvious reading that I missed. It is a climate change novel because Beard represents us all, too greedy and carnal to prevent the disaster looming over us. Climate change is not just a background; it’s built allegorically into the novel.

A lot of critics have reviewed Solar poorly, but as a McEwan fan, I enjoyed it. 7.5/10.

[Book review] Unless: So strange and yet so normal

09 Tuesday Mar 2010

Posted by in book review

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Unless / Carol Shields (2002)

I have been a poor reader lately, finding it hard to finish anything, yet Carol Shields’ final novel, Unless, hooked me.  It is the story of a woman in her forties, the writer of ‘light’ fiction and translations, Reta, whose daughter, Norah, suddenly leaves home and sits on the same street each day begging for money. The situation is breaking Reta’s heart even as life insists on going on and she attempts to write the sequel to her first novel.

It is deceptively ‘domestic’, almost ‘light fiction’, with the trappings of a middle-aged woman with a circle of good friends trying to hold her family together, and a (sort of) conventional ending. Yet as a reader I sensed more and more that Shields was playing sophisticated games  with me.

It is  a passionately yet somehow gently feminist novel (perhaps I say gently because of its subtlety). The chapters are interspersed with letters to various public figures or critics or writer who have ignored or silenced women in their articles or books. The whole novel seems to be a protest about the dismissal of  domestic/ family concerns as ‘light’ women’s fiction. Tellingly, an editor is trying to rewrite Reta’s new novel, to turn it into a man’s quest for greatness, rather than a woman’s quest for goodness. Perhaps Shields’ response is to silence Reta’s husband, Tom, who is never more than a background character. I might be tempted to call his lack of involvement a weakness, if I wasn’t so suspicious it was  a ploy of Shields’ that I was falling into.

It is an uneasy novel. Every criticism I am tempted to make of it could be read as a deliberate protest against my assumptions. I felt that it moved too slowly, with too little happening and too long spent thinking about the situation; yet maybe I’m trying to ‘edit’ Shields’ novel just like the nasty editor is trying to edit Reta’s.

I was hooked by its pearls of insight into life and its elegant enigmas. I was sad all the way through, knowing that Shields died of breast cancer soon after it was published.

8/10

Review – Damned Good : A Poker Novel by J.J. Deceglie

22 Monday Feb 2010

Posted by in book review, Western Australia

≈ 1 Comment

Fontaine Press, 2010. 128p. www.damnedgood.com.au

Damned Good is  a season in the life of the Rookie, an emerging poker player who takes the Perth poker scene by storm before heading to Melbourne to take on Australia’s best, Rawlins. It’s a short novel full of booze, cards and philosophising, with few first names but instead characters called the Rookie, the Kid, Rawlins, Indersmith.

It’s subtitled ‘a poker novel’, but it could as easily be subtitled ‘an existential novel’. For the Rookie, poker is a mode of existence, a lens to see the world through:

For him it was where he had to be.

Severe naked existence.

This was living in the world.

There was not a thing else like it.

Moments he guessed were like the cards falling from the deck, destined randomness and predetermined chance, opportunities bobbing up and it there for you to take or blow. (p.7)

It’s in high-stakes poker that the Rookie has found what it means to live authentically, dangerously. The novel may leave many readers wishing they were as cool as the Rookie. He’s a man who thinks existential thoughts, writes manifestos he burns, and can drink bourbon continuously without it affecting his poker.

The two writers this novel reminds me of most are William Gibson and Cormac McCarthy. The Rookie is a hero in the tradition of those streetwise heroes of Gibson’s cyberpunk novels, brilliant at what they do. The prose has similar crisp, unexpected metaphors. Yet it’s also close to the prose and characters of McCarthy’s Border Trilogy, the brave cowboys who don’t say too much, but think deep thoughts and experience a kind of brutal beauty in their world. And the prose has a similar clipped, sparse beauty. Minimal dialogue, no speech marks.

After the climax of the showdown with Rawlins, the narrative is interrupted by an eight page booklet called “Authentic Poker”, presumably the Rookie’s manuscript, a cross between a poker manual and Nietzche.

Try to remember as often as possible that you will one day die. It is the surest method of allowing yourself to seek authenticity and essence with a full and unswerving heart.

Part Two skips forward a while in the Rookie’s life, after an ‘off-screen’ fall. The novel closes with a fascinatingly surreal poker game.

Damned Good is a worthy follow up to Deceglie’s  debut novel, The Sea Is Not Yet Full. I love the evocation of a kind of underground Perth and Fremantle.  It’s a compact and interesting story with a character and a milieu which are refreshing for Australian literature.

My ten favourite novels read in 2009

08 Friday Jan 2010

Posted by in books, lists

≈ 1 Comment

  1. Libra / Don DeLillo (1989)
    DeLillo uses the contradictions and paradoxes of the assassination and of what we know of Lee Oswald to create a complex situation and a paradoxical character, represented by the scales of Libra – a man weighing contradictory things at the same time, ready to tip one way or the other. The paradoxes make for a postmodern novel, a postmodern character, a postmodern world like DeLillo always evokes.
  2. Ragtime / E.L. Doctorow (1975)
     Perhaps Doctorow achieves what Geoff Nicholson wishes he could achieve – to say much and to say it with brilliant comedy. But more precisely he brings to mind Don DeLillo with his ambitiousness, tackling big American themes through real historical figures. He writes with a lot of wit. His panorama shot captures a millieu, a decade of American life. The family at the centre recur throughout without ever being named – Father, Mother, Son, Grandfather. Harry Houdini makes several appearences; Pierpont Morgan too few as a man obssessed by pyramids and attempting to set up a secret society with the only man made of the same stuff – Henry Ford.
  3. Gilead / Marilynne Robinson (2004)
     Her characters have a wisdom and identity tied to family and place that make me wish I had all these things. A novel which embodies grace.
  4. The Furies / Janet Hobhouse (1993)
     Everyone treats it as autobiography rather than the novel it was published as, and it certainly has the feel of autobiography. The trajectory of the narrative has all the repetitiousness and random intrusions of life itself. Her prose has an unusual quality: confessional, honest without a hint of apology. Her story is compelling, giving the feel of life without even zooming in on many scenes, but capturing the flow of it.
  5. Possession / A.S. Byatt (1990)
     An engrossing story of two contemporary literary scholars – Roland Mitchell and Maud Bailey – who discover a secret affair between two (fictional) nineteenth century poets – Randolph Ash and Christobel LaMotte. The scholarly world is captured with all its interesting intrigues.
  6. Kafka on the Shore / Haruki Murakami (2002)
     A strange world and a strange voice, colloquial yet elegant.
  7. The Line of Beauty / Alan Hollinghurst (2004)
    An engrossing and elegant portrait of the top end of town during the Thatcher years, through the eyes of a young gay man attaching himself to a well-to-do family.
  8. Invisible / Paul Auster (2009)
     Familiar themes – the mysterious stranger offering a young man the chance of a lifetime; the allure of his beautiful girlfriend. More complete as a novel than Man In The Dark but less complete than the glory days of Leviathan, Moon Palace, Music of Chance. Notable for being the most sexually explicit of his novels.
  9. War and Peace / Leo Tolstoy (1868)
     It’s common to hear that War and Peace contains all of life, depicting the full range of human experiences. As a reader, it also evoked the full range of reading experiences for me, from the exhiliration of acute insight that resonated with my experience of life, to boring pages I wanted to flick over; from thrilling narrative drive to moments of narrative listlessness.
  10. The Cement Garden / Ian McEwan (1978)
     A transgressive novel set over a hot summer as orphaned children negotiate life and sex together. I couldn’t put it down.
  11. Bech at Bay / John Updike
     A superbly entertaining book, written in Updike’s exquisite prose, about Bech, the Jewish writer.

(What was I going to do, leave Updike out the year he died?)

Non fiction

  1. Library: An Unquiet History / Matthew Battles (2002)
     A highly readable but immensely learned and witty accounts of libraries through history, and their inevitable destruction.
  2. Nothing To Be Frightened Of / Julian Barnes (2008)
     I couldn’t put this memoir down. I didn’t mean to read it all but I couldn’t help it. I could discern no structure at all, but just followed Barnes for two hundred pages of reflections on death and God through the lens of his family. The whole memoir has the sort of wistfulness of the opening line quoted in the title of this post: ‘I don’t believe in God but I miss him.’
  3. Ex Libris / Anne Fadiman (1998)
    A delightful book of ‘reading memoirs’ – Anne Fadiman’s life in books. The kind of essays this blog would aspire to.
  4. The Genessee Diary / Henri Nouwen (1976)
    A profound exploration of one man’s spirituality, as he reflects each day on the world and himself during a season in a monastery.
  5. American Journeys / Don Watson (2008)
     A rambling travelogue, beautifully written, that keeps recurring around the centrality of fundamentalist Christianity to the experience of living in America. I have an endless fascination and horror with fundamentalist Christianity, and so I find this interesting, all the things he hears on the radio and sees on the telly, all the signs he sees about Jesus. There’s a lot more to it, of course, it’s just as much about politics and history and travel.

(That’s it for the lists for a while. )

My favourite novels of the decade

02 Saturday Jan 2010

Posted by in books, lists

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

,

I don’t read many new release novels – maybe only a couple a year. I’d rather draw on the decades of great novels published in the past. But there’s something to be said for reading current fiction – it keeps one’s finger on the pulse and engaged with the current conversation. This list is an account of my favourite novels published between 2000 and 2009 – of the limited number I’ve read. There are quite a few obvious choices which made a big impact on the world, as well as some underrated, lesser known works. What do you think of my choices? And what are your favourites?

1. Atonement / Ian McEwan (2001)
One of the most beautifully written novels I have ever read. McEwan’s prose has an exquisite transparency and elegance. His page turning story of a young girl’s jealous accusation against her sister’s working class lover turns into a bigger exploration of forgiveness and writing itself. He has such insight into the characters’ minds, and an ability to represent everyone’s reality. For me, a perfect novel.

2. The Corrections / Jonathan Franzen (2001)
This is the best portrait of the decade I’ve read, even though it’s probably set in the late nineties. It is an engrossing picture of a family set against all the anxieties of a world of economic rationalization and a middle class which doesn’t know why it’s alive. A bit like John Updike, but darker, more blackly humorous and less warm. Like Updike writing as Easton Ellis. It has the funniest scenes I have ever read in any book, especially when Chip tries to steal a fish stuffed down his pants and when he decides at the last moment to send out some Christmas presents.

3. What I Loved / Siri Hustvedt (2003)
A story of art and a story of family, full of the poignancy of years. It is a strange novel, spanning a couple of genres with some twists that reflect life itself. The elegiac beauty of the title captures the tone of the whole work.

4. The Book of Illusions / Paul Auster (2002)
Auster near his best. A grieving academic is summoned to the house of a silent film star, Hector Mann, long thought to be dead. It’s a sophisticated page turner, a kind of treasure hunt where the treasure is some films previously unknown to the world. But it’s also an examination of death and the meaning of life.

5. The Turning / Tim Winton (2004)
This collection grabbed me completely. A beautiful Western Australian portrait of big moments in small lives. The connections between the stories make reading the book compulsive, hoping but not guaranteed to know more about the characters as we are shifted back and forward between narrators and decades. In the end the tapestry is almost a novel, particularly the story of Victor and Gail.

6. We Need To Talk About Kevin / Lionel Shriver (2003)
The story of a high school massacrer, told by his mother. Shriver has an ability, like McEwan, to articulate experiences I thought were inarticulatable, modes of thinking, feelings which I am only half aware of.

7. Youth / J.M. Coetzee (2002)
A sparse account of a troubled youth who dreams of literary greatness in London as an exile from South Africa. He cannot connect with people. The prose is lean without a spare word, getting so well to states of mind and insight into youthful ambition and disappointment.

8. On Chesil Beach / Ian McEwan (2007)
A heartbreaking short novel about a couple’s disastrous wedding night, brilliantly insightful into the differences in perception and emotion that can cause devastating conflict between lovers.

9. Saturday / Ian McEwan (2005)
Manages to show the state of the world through one man’s mind on one day. Perowne is a neurosurgeon; the Saturday in question is the day of the anti-war protests just before the invasion of Iraq. In his relationship to his family, a game of squash and a road-rage incident which turns into a home invasion by a thug, he feels and thinks about the state of the world and the state of his life. McEwan’s prose has these moments of intense insight that are beautiful to read. He manages to write about what it’s like to listen to a certain piece of music, or the subtle feelings you might have waking in the middle of night and watching your wife sleep. The final scene lifts the whole novel another notch, an inspired piece of writing with Henry Perowne looking out on the square at the end of the long Saturday and thinking about what will come in the future, the leaving of his children, the death of his mother and father-in-law; the terrorist attack that has to happen. He imagines another doctor standing looking out at the square in 1903, and how this doctor would not believe what was to happen in the next one hundred years.

10. Sweet / Tracy Ryan (2008)
The story of three women caught in the thrall of a manipulative pastor of a conservative Baptist church in the outer-suburbs of Perth circa 1986. The Reverend William King is a complex figure, genuinely caring but always controlling. The prose is smooth and unintrusive and filled with flashes of beauty. The structure effectively balances and interweaves the stories of the three women connected by William. It is at once an engrossing drama of broad interest and yet also an important portrait of the evangelical world, a world rarely depicted in literature.

11. The Diviners / Rick Moody (2005)
An ambitious, sprawling novel depicting America in the uncertainty of the disputed election of 2000 through the prism of the flurry around a mini-series project that is picked up and hyped throughout the media industry. It is the same sort of book as Ulysses – with constant literary innovation and such a wide range of voices and styles. Of course, it’s not nearly as good; the only passages that approach brilliance are those where Moody returns to his forte – the suburbs and the family. But even where it isn’t brilliant, it is always good, entertaining, engaging and insightful. It finishes with a futile flourish, as the network CEO is assured by a judge in the disputed returns that the climate is right to crush the mini-series and everything it stands for; the future is reality TV, Republican and patriotic.

12. The Blind Assassin / Margaret Atwood (2000)
A literary mystery with a span of decades. Her characters leap off the page.

13. Gilead / Marilynne Robinson (2004)
The best Christian novel I have ever read, a testimony of grace and faith in small town America in the 1950s as an old man looks back on the life he has lived and hopes for the future of his young son.

14. Trip to the Stars / Nicholas Christopher (2000)
A beautiful novel of coincidence, tracing a boy after he is kidnapped from a planetarium in the 1960s. One for fans of Paul Auster.

15. The Brief History of the Dead / Kevin Brockmeier (2006)
A rare book set in an afterlife in which the dead live while people on Earth still remember them. Wonderful territory, stretching our imagination and beautifully told.

16. Atomised / Michel Houellebecq (2000)
A bleak novel about death and the way it wipes out any hope in the world, tempered by the (disturbing) hope of a future individual-less Buddhist utopia.

17. Liv / Morgan Yasbincek (2000)
A lyrical Western Australian novel told in short fragments and telling the story of the daughter of an immigrant family finding her feet in the world.

18. Dirt Music / Tim Winton (2001)
Winton has done something special in writing a book so full of Western Australia, a compulsive story with broad appeal and moments of profound observation.

19. Notes on a Scandal / Zoe Heller (2003)
Page-turning diary of a passive-aggressive teacher observing her teacher friend embark on an affair with a student. Witty and insightful.

20. Bedlam Burning / Geoff Nicholson (2000)
A comic novel in the best British tradition telling the story of a writer-in-residence at an asylum.

Barbara Vine’s The Blood Doctor as a Biographer’s Tale and Some Narrative Analysis

17 Thursday Dec 2009

Posted by in book review, writing

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Barbara Vine, The Blood Doctor (2002)

The Blood Doctor is a biographer’s tale. Martin Nanther is researching the life of his great-great grandfather, Lord Henry Nanther, specialist in haemophilia and personal physician to Queen Victoria.

The story is set in 1999, as Martin sits out the last days of his life as a hereditary peer in the House of Lords. A bill is going through to abolish hereditary peers and he sees the logic of it, as much as he is deeply sad to leave behind a world he has come to love. Vine’s treatment of this aspect of the novel is repetitious at times, although it is an interesting subplot, relating as it does to the peership bestowed upon Henry Nanther.

Toward the end of the novel, Martin is short of money and contemplates taking on a real job while exiled from his former home at the House of Lords. Vine provides a resolution to this by having the government offer him as a position as chief whip; he returns to his beloved House. She makes some effort to foreshadow this by having several characters comment on how well-liked Martin is and how they would like to see him stay on in the house. It still comes as something of a bolt out of the blue, the sort of event quite standard in real life, but not making particular narrative sense.

The other subplot is the fertility problem of Martin and his wife Jude. Martin has a son from his first marriage and doesn’t want another child – except for Jude’s sake; she desperately wants one and at 37, time is running out. She has already miscarried once, and the novel is punctuated by a couple more miscarriages. Again, we have something of a deus ex machina in the form of IVF treatment, giving Jude a healthy baby who won’t spontaneously abort. The resonance with the blood theme is apparent; I’m undecided whether it’s a satisfactory narrative solution.

But the main plotline is Martin’s research into the life of Henry Nanther. Certain problems confront the writer attempting to write the biographer’s tale. Firstly, the problem of two timelines: there is the action in the present day in which the biographer lives and discovers things about the figure of the past. And there is also the timeline of the past in which the subject of the biography lived and died. The problem is that it would seem much too contrived for the discoveries of the biographer in the present day to neatly follow the sequence of events in the life of the subject. Discoveries are going to come from different periods and have to be sorted chronologically by the biographer. This works against creating a coherent narrative.

Vine attempts to solve this problem by giving us an outline of what Martin already knows about Henry’s life early in the novel. This makes sense; the biographer starts out knowing something about the subject, and these facts are revealed over several chapters, some through exposition and some through convenient conversations. The gaps in the biographer’s knowledge are also revealed. In the case of The Blood Doctor, Martin’s ‘gap’ is the revelation that Henry had a mistress in a letter written by Martin’s great-aunt. The second ‘gap’ Vine leaves hidden until it comes up in a dinner party conversation – Henry was engaged to a woman who was thrown from a train and murdered. Soon after, he married the murdered woman’s sister.

Working from Henry’s diary and some other sources, Martin concludes that Henry engineered a meeting with the murdered fiancée by saving her father from an arranged mugging. The central mystery of the whole book hangs on why he was so obsessed with marrying into this unprestigious family. Martin begins to conclude that Henry had his first fiancée murdered. In the end, the murder proves to be a complicating coincidence, a red herring to throw us off Henry’s real crime – a possibly unsatisfying narrative outcome.

The second problem facing the writer of a biographer’s tale is the limits of biography itself. A novel lets us – usually – into the hearts and minds of its characters. A historical biography is a reconstruction, limited by the available evidence, the sources that the biographer finds. In Possession, A.S. Byatt makes this task easier by supplying passionately written letters between the subjects and poetry. But Henry Nanther was no poet and it may have been out of place to make him a good writer, in touch with his feelings. So what we are left with is Martin Nanther’s speculations based on Henry’s emotionless and scant journal entries and notebook.

Vine further handicaps herself by creating a second notebook which Martin manages to trace to a distant relative. Only he’s too late; his cousin’s senile father accidentally threw out the notebook with the recycling – the notebook in which Henry finally tells the truth about what he has done, why he was obsessed with marrying one of the Robinson sisters. Thankfully, the senile father remembers the gist of it, which he feebly relates to Martin. It’s rather unsatisfactory and unnecessary; if it was a postmodern novel, it might be telling us of the transmissions of texts or reveling in the uncertainty. But it’s not; it’s a psychological thriller which doesn’t evoke its own psychology enough.

Blood Doctor is an interesting novel to read for me; it highlights the narrative challenges of its subject and gives me some clues about strategies good and bad. But if you’re reading for pleasure, I would suggest Barbara Vine’s earlier novel, The Chimney Sweeper’s Boy. I would say that at her best Barbara Vine is a wonderful guilty pleasure for litfiction readers.

[Thursday 3pm #36] By the orange trees

10 Thursday Dec 2009

Posted by in autobiographical, books, Series: Thursday 3pm feature posts (2009)

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

So I missed a week and no-one commented. That’s a relief, in one sense. Last Thursday I was camping in the bush, a long way from a computer.

It was a semi-cleared area near Jarrahdale, and I pitched my tent near a row of four old orange trees. Animals – kangaroos, is my guess – had stripped all the oranges on the lower branches, but there were plenty higher up, slightly sour with hard to peel skin. Further over was a tall oak tree. Near my tent were pieces of an old china plate and broken bottles.

I tried to picture the house which must have stood there. There should be monuments in places like this. To think people might have lived whole lives in that space, and no-one even knows today.  Our ancestors are strangers who leave some traces, a mystery to us.

While sitting under the shade of a gum tree on Thursday afternoon, I finished Anne Fadiman’s excellent collection of personal bibliographic essays, Ex-Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader.  These are the kind of essays I aspire to in this blog. She writes about the experience of ‘marrying’ her book collection with her husband’s and the challenges of agreeing on ways to arrange books. She explores the ins and outs of annotating – or not annotating – books. (I am a lead pencil annotater. I have sympathy with people who consider it desecration.)

[Thursday 3pm #34] Paul Auster’s Invisible : a review

19 Thursday Nov 2009

Posted by in book review, Series: Thursday 3pm feature posts (2009)

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

,

It’s been a prolific decade for my favourite author, Paul Auster –he has just published his sixth novel of the noughties. As prolific as he’s been, he’s also published some of his weakest works –I don’t care for the crowd-pleasing Brooklyn Follies nor Travels in the Scriptorium, although at least they’re better than Timbuktu, his late nineties novel told through the eyes of a dog. I rate his new novel, Invisible, the second best of the six of the decade, after The Book of Illusions. It is the most typical of his whole career, with many of his recurring elements appearing – a mysterious stranger, a change of fortune, a struggling poet translating French texts, a random act of violence, and a framed narrative.

As almost always happens in Auster’s novels, the protagonist is a male New Yorker born in 1947 and a student at Columbia. Adam Walker is a college student and aspiring poet and the novel is about the defining year of his life, 1967.

Adam meets a mysterious stranger at a party – Rudolf Born – who makes him an offer that will change his life; Born will pay Adam to edit a literary magazine. Born is called away on business, and Adam is seduced by Born’s girlfriend, Margot. Yet it isn’t this that causes a rift between them, but Born’s violent stabbing of a mugger. Adam spends much of the rest of the novel hoping to see justice served on Born for the murder.

In between, he has lots of sex with his sister, and even though there’s been hints of incest in Auster’s work before (In The Country of Last Things, The Red Notebook, from memory) it is the sexual explicitness of this novel that is its most atypical feature. Usually Auster summarizes sex without going into much detail at all, but this time he is more anatomical.

Complicating the story is a complicated framing device. The first part about Walker meeting Born and things going wrong, is revealed to be the first chapter of a manuscript Walker has written in the present day and sent to his friend Jim, a famous writer. Walker is terminally ill and is trying to finish the memoir before he dies. (A situation which recalls Thomas Effing telling Fogg his life story in Moon Palace for his obituary, and Hector Mann bringing Zimmer to his ranch to see his secret films before he dies in The Book of Illusions.)  After Jim’s framing, the second part of the novel is told in second person to overcome Walker’s writer’s block. The third part of the novel is filled out by Jim from Walker’s rough notes. As Walker’s narrative ends, Jim does some detective work, tracking down the people involved and trying to solve some of the mysteries.

It is a compulsively readable story, fascinating and littered with insights into the way we make meaning of life and how we decide what to do with ourselves. In her review, Lionel Shriver contended that there is nothing to take away from the book, that it’s like a glass of lemonade. I think part of what she is noticing and what disappoints her is an insistence by Auster that his narratives attempt to mimic some of the randomness of life, with both its coincidence and its failure to resolve. I read a reviewer once describe Auster’s work as a handful of smooth stones rubbing against each other, but not yielding anything as simple as meaning.

Perhaps Auster has had a bad influence on me over the last nine years that I’ve been reading him. Particularly in my first two novels and in an abandoned novel or two, I attempted to emulate his randomness, thinking I could just add it as one more element in a palimpsest of all my favourite writers – a bit of Auster’s randomness, a bit of Joyce’s stream of consciousness, a bit of Dick’s madness – in the one narrative. Not possible. The whole narrative world has to be driven by randomness, if one wants to write about the music of chance.

[Thursday 3pm #33] Extract from the Library of Babel III

12 Thursday Nov 2009

Posted by in libraries, reading, Series: Thursday 3pm feature posts (2009)

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

As he looked for books to reshelve, he would walk amongst the readers bent over their desks and imagine he could hear the murmur of their thoughts. All those words going through people’s heads, making some connection, some act of communication between writer and reader, sometimes across gaps of centuries. It was miraculous. With his thoughts on this, the reading area hummed and shouted with the glory of the silent communion.

All these people embarked on their own quests, their own projects, an aim, a question, a desire to read they kept inside their head. The library did not ask them why they came. They just came, walking in here to take certain books off the shelves and read.

Silent exterior, noisy interior. A beautiful place, the library.

[Thursday 3pm #30] Tom attempts to throw some books out

22 Thursday Oct 2009

Posted by in books, Series: Thursday 3pm feature posts (2009)

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Extract #2 from novel-in-progress The Library of Babel

Over a rainy spring week, they packed their belongings in boxes. They had too much stuff; they had to keep going back for more boxes. There were so many things Tom only looked at each time he moved. He wondered if he should accept this or whether he should throw them out. Maybe it was what made moving worthwhile – it forced him to revisit objects, to reconnect with his past and the things he’d decided were worth keeping.

Then, sorting through the computer leads, half dead batteries, assorted pencil tins given as gifts by his mum which had accumulated in drawers, he revised his thinking. There were many things he hadn’t decided were worth keeping; they had just clung on to him like prickles and he had failed to throw them out, or he had some sense that they might be needed.

He got to the books which had outgrown his shelves and were doublestacked in places. The Sinclair Morgan Library’s problem in miniature. He put six in a pile to take to the opshop, four of them which he’d failed to read in ten years of having them and two which he’d read and hadn’t loved. He couldn’t find a single other book amongst his thousand that he was prepared to part with.

He began packing his thousand books in cardboard boxes. He was thinking about what qualified a book for keeping. If it was a favourite book, that obviously needed keeping. But also if it had lots of annotations – ticks on favourite passages, underlinings, comments, dates he started different chapters – those books qualified for keeping too, even if they weren’t favourites. Those books retained a record of the hours spent on them. He liked to think that reading back over the annotations enabled him to recall the reading experience, reanimating the time he had put into the book.

And then there were books that he thought he’d be going back to, reference books, difficult books which needed re-reading, classic books he needed to check things in or to have on his shelf for appearance’s sake. Maybe he was being too harsh on himself; it wasn’t that many people ever inspected his shelves. It was more likely it was for his own self-esteem; it told him that he was capable of reading Finnegan’s Wake and Moby Dick – one day.

Anita caught him in the lounge spending too long on the books and said, ‘Do you want me to do this for you?’

‘No,’ he said. She used to like reading till she married him. But she told him that his obsession with books had put her off them. As a kind of conscientious objection to his preoccupation, she was reading very little these days. It wasn’t working; he read as much as ever, but he felt lonely that he couldn’t talk books with her as much as they had when they were dating.

When he finally finished packing the books, pin and needles ran through his legs from crouching down so long. He picked up the pile of six discards to put them in a plastic bag, only to reconsider three, which he added to the last box. It barely seemed worth taking the three other books to the opshop, but he needed to make some gesture toward deaccumulation.