Shawn Towner
Holy crap this is a good book. It's got action, adventure, romance, vampires, creepy little girls with telepathic powers, Jenna Bush as governor, and even a dog eating vomit. If you read one book this summer, it should be The Passage. If you go through the Summer of 2010 without at least starting The Passage, well then you've wasted your entire summer. Awesome, awesome book. I can't wait to see how Ridley Scott fudges up the movie version.
I had some initial reservations about reading Red April because I don't know much about Peruvian revolutionary history or the Senderista. Fortunately, the novel is much more of a murder mystery than it is a work of historical fiction. The plot deals with a serious of gruesome murders that occur during Holy Week in Peru. A young prosecutor investigating the crimes feels that it might be the work of terrorists. It's the terrorist angle that really makes Red April such a great novel.
This could be just because I read the novel on the same day as the New York Times ran an article about the use of the word ‘terrorism,' but I really enjoyed the way Red April mixed a murder mystery plot with a questioning of the nature and meaning of terrorism. The prosecutor in the story has to deal not only with the murders but is also faced with the difficult task of separating friend from foe and terrorists from freedom fighters.
1,000-page book are always an interesting experience. No matter how great the talent of an author, maintaining sustained interest and excitement in a 100-page novel is an artistic challenge of the highest order. Sustaining interest and excitement over the entirety of a 1000-page novel is a downright impossibility. So, like any 1000-page novel, Adam Levin's The Instructions has its slow points, about a 200-page chunk just before the midpoint of the novel. During those chapters, I was almost ready to give up on the novel. The characters were so frustrating, so unlikeable that spending another 500-600 pages with them seemed like a punishment. However, I had pumped myself up for the task of tackling a 1000-page novel, and I wasn't going to let remorselessly violent characters and their enabling parents fail at that task. Thankfully, my perseverance was rewarded. Although many of Levin's characters are not likable, their unlikablity (unlikeableness? I don't think either one of those are real words, but I'm sticking with unlikability) helps to create a novel that is confoundingly brilliant; the type of novel that will never provoke the same reaction from different readers.
The Instructions tells the story of Gurion ben-Judah Maccabee, a 10-year-old scholar and provocateur. Kicked out of a variety of Jewish schools for violent outburst, Gurion ends up in a program called the Cage, which is essentially an in-school lock down for the worst of the worst students. In the cage, students are not allowed to talk or even look at one another and the teachers and monitor give them no support, causing the students to act out, which in turn leads to harsher disciplinary consequences. As an educator, I realize that this type of situation will never be productive. It breeds a level of discontent and disrespect that will never be reconciled. So I understand why Gurion feels it is necessary to lead a revolt, but what I find distasteful is the levels to which he goes.
Believing that he might possibly be the Messiah, Gurion distribute scriptures, trains an army in secret, then leads his followers in a violent revolt that is, if not Biblical, at the very least Shakespearean in magnitude. People die, children are mutilated and tortured, and all this is done largely without remorse. Even Gurion's parents, at least in the early stages of the book, encourage his standoffishness and his desire to overcome his oppressors. It is the fact that Gurion and his followers show so little empathy for those around them and so little remorse or concern for their actions that make The Instructions so frustrating.
On the other hand, the book is structured as Scripture; as the Word of Gurion. So it is possible that this sociopathic disregard for humanity is an issue of perspective. Gurion want to be seen as a righteous and just leader, and righteous and just leaders don't have qualms about their actions.
Then there's the fact that Gurion and his followers have admirable qualities. They are smart, loyal, loving, and have been treated in ways that no middle schooler should have to experience. I want to like Gurion, in spite of his arrogant disregard for the safety and well-being of others (which is the same disregard shown to he and his friends in the Cage). I want to like Gurion's sidekicks, Benji Nakamook and Eliyahu of Brooklyn, in spite of their psychotic outburst and belief that violence will solve their problems. I do like the female characters, June and Jelly, who bring out the goodness in Gurion and Benji. And I love the fat characters, with their broken English and their desire to finally stand up for themselves, just not with the same level of violence as Gurion and his Side of Damage. It is these redeeming qualities, even as the characters destroy their school and their classmates, that makes the book enjoyable, even if the characters are not.
Over the course of the 1000+ pages of The Instructions, I went from despising the characters, to rooting for them, to despising them, to begrudgingly accepting their handling of an out-of-control situation. Any work that can hold my interest, sway my emotions, and frustrate me to the point of almost quitting, is okay in my book. And The Instructions is more than okay. It's great.
This book speaks to me in a couple of ways:
1. I've driven the path of Route 66 from East to West, although I did it in a very different fashion than the author. I wasn't exploring America, I was driving as part of my move from NJ to AZ. So I didn't stop to explore. I recognize many of the landmarks they mention in the book, but only as they are seen when speeding past them on the highway. So there's a lot I recognize in the book, but it also shows what I missed on my 3-day cross-country journey. For instance, I didn't know that Amarillo, TX had a significant refugee population and a surprising food scene. I ate at the Red Robin near the Holiday Inn Express.
2. This reminds me of Orlando's Little-While Friends and I LOVE Orlando's Little-While Friends.
This a perfect book for readers of all ages. Easy enough for kids to follow and understand and enjoy (lots of quality poop content) but meaningful and relevant for adults and readers of all ages who travel to learn and discover and make meanings from the intersections of people, place, and history.
A wonderful book about a non-verbal Hungarian midget named Rovar who sells meat out of a school bus in Virginia. The novel is structured in a fashion that reminds me of Everything is Illuminated: chapters in the present alternating with chapters in the past. The chapters dealing with the past in The Convalescent focus on the lost, forgotten, and neglected 11th tribe of Hungary. This 11th tribe is a clan of deformed butchers and a giant monk who revolutionizes mounted combat archery.
Like Everything is Illuminated, the sections taking place in the past are filled with elements of magical realism, which eventually spills over into the present-day plot. As much as I enjoy the magical realism, the one problem I had with the novel was the Kafkaesque ending. I was fine with Rovar's hallucinatory visions of Speedo-clad water polo captains and Carly Simon, but I didn't care for the magical absurdity of the last few pages of the novel.
McSweeney's did a great job choosing author Jessica Anthony as the first winner of the Amanda Davis Highwire Fiction Award. The Convalescent is a great book and I highly recommend it to anyone who likes stories about non-verbal midget meatmongers.
I've been reading a lot about Tinkers lately on the Internets, as it kind of came out of nowhere to win the Pulitzer Prize. While it's great that a small-press novel can both fly under the radar and be critically acclaimed, I wasn't all that impressed by the novel. It's wonderfully written, but not all that interesting or memorable. For a novel that uses death to reflect on life, I'd stick with Jim Crace's magnificent Being Dead
A bizarre little novel filled with lists, supernatural demon things, and a man whose curse is to be slapped once every day. At times the novel seems to be trying way to hard to be weird, but it's also an engaging mix of mystery, horror, comedy. It's the type of that can't have an ending that both makes sense and is completely satisfying, so the last 15 pages or so are a little disappointing, but the ending doesn't negate all the good stuff in the other 94% of the novel.
I haven't subscribed to Granta for all that long, but this is the best one I've read yet. A great Karen Russell story and phenomenal stories by Ben Marcus and Andre Aciman.
A book that tries to straddle the line between literary fiction and genre fiction, and for the first part of the book, struggles to do so. A magnificent Jane Eyre allusion follow immediately by an inelegant Tennyson reference. The interesting thoughts of a werewolf musing on the meaning of his existence mixed with sentences only a graduate student could love: “All paradigm shifts answer the amoral craving for novelty.”
But eventually, the novel moves more firmly into genre fiction territory, complete with werewolf-vampire showdowns, monogrammed silver javelins, and a wide variety of double crosses. And once the novel begins the move in this direction, it becomes much more readable and much more enjoyable.
Very different from the movie. In the movie, the focus is much more on bullying and how the Oskar-Eli relationship helps Oskar deal with his tormentors. The book extends the focus to include more complete views of peripheral characters. The bullying storyline, while still present, is not as prominent as in the movie and there is a lot more pedophilia, genital mutilation, gender confusion, sections narrated by a frightened squirrel, and even a masturbating zombie. Swedish literature, or at least the half-dozen books I've read, is odd.
Handling the Undead starts out with a lot of potential. Instead of just having scary zombies chomping on brains, the book opens with the dead rising, but not as monsters. The undead (or reliving, as they're called in the book) are ambulatory vegetables, who occasionally show glimpses of infant-like cognizance. The characters in the novel are forced to deal with the return of their dead loved ones not in the sense of “Holy crap! Grandpa's back and he wants to eat my brains!” but “Hey, Grandpa's back, as a smelly, half-rotted, largely helpless walking corpse. Now what do we do with him?” And when the novel focuses on the emotional drama of the reliving, it is very good, especially the plot about the reporter who digs up his dead grandson to make sure the military doesn't get him first. Unfortunately the book moves away from the emotional drama and into kooky psychic nonsense. Turns out the reliving let living people around them read each other's minds, which has dire, if poorly explicated consequences.
This transition to psychic gobbledygook reminds me of Johan Theorin's The Darkest Room, which started out as an excellent psychological/emotional thriller but eventually wandered into the realm of the supernatural, with disappointing results. If Handling the Undead had stayed focused on the characters of Mahler and David (who lost their grandson and wife, respectively) it could have been a fantastic and intelligent addition to the zombie genre. Instead, it adds in subplots about psychic phenomenon, emo cutters, and religious nutjobs preaching the end of days, all of which detract from the strengths of the novel.
A book that I could literally not put down until I finished reading it. One of the main characters is a lazy, mediocre teacher who is plotting the murder of a veteran co-worker, so maybe that made it easy for me to identify with the novel.
More non-fiction than I expected, but I also thought that the title “Aliens” meant space aliens, not strangers in a strange land aliens. Many of the non-fiction pieces were interesting reads, but none were particularly outstanding. Mostly long-form, magazine-style, personal essays, with the occasional narrative thrown in to make things a little more literary. One of the stories in the collection, Nami Mun's “The Anniversary,” was phenomenal. It was like a Raymond Carver story–harsh and heartbreaking.
Writing a vampire novel in this day and age must be a daunting undertaking for any self-respecting artiste. No matter how dark, dirty, and violent you make your vampires, there's always going to be a comparison to Twilight. And if you want to recreate the image of vampires, casting them as near-regular people, rather than undead supernatural monsters, then you're basically begging to be lumped in with the other trash on the “Teen Paranormal Romance” shelf at Barnes and Noble. In his novel, The Radleys, Matt Haig manages to successfully overcome the teen paranormal romance temptation and craft a portrait of suburban vampires.
By casting his vampire family in the British countryside, Haig makes some choice alterations to the typical vampire myth elements. Vampires aren't vampires, they are blood addicts–living people who crave blood and gain power from it. Some of the common vampire ailments remain: blood addicts are weakened by sunlight and have allergic reactions to garlic, but they are not immortal. They can die of old age, but aging works at a much slower pace, allowing blood addicts to live for hundreds of years. The novel also presents an alternate history where all the great artists (Byron, Hendrix, Douglas Sirk) are blood addicts and the lesser talents (Sting, Phil Collins) are not. Also, when the blood addicts drink blood, they can fly. That part doesn't make a lot of sense. They don't change into bats or fog or anything like that, they just up and fly around, like characters from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. It's very easy to view Haig's blood addicts as variations on Popeye: without their spinach (blood), they're weak and tired; with their spinach, they have the powers of superheroes. I realize that a novel where vampires are really Popeyes might seem a little ridiculous, but The Radleys manages to avoid being too outlandish. In fact, rather than describing it as a novel where vampires are really Popeyes, I should categorize The Radleys as a novel about middle-class suburban ennui, or middle-class suburban malaise, or middle-class suburban [insert pretentious foreign-sounding word here]. The Radleys isn't so much a typical vampire novel as it is a Jonathan Franzen novel, if Jonathan Franzen novels had vampires and weren't so insufferably awful.
The Radleys tells the story of a family struggling to find its identity. The parents, Peter and Helen, are abstaining blood addicts, using meat to feed their cravings and attempting to live as normal a life as possible. Their teenage children, Rowan and Clara, are completely unaware of their true nature, believing that they suffer from hereditary medical conditions that cause photo-sensitivity, insomnia, and migraine headaches. The family tries to lead a regular life, but the parents suffer from a largely loveless marriage and the children are outcasts at school. This sounds like the makings of a cliched tale of mid-life crises and teenagers learning to be cool by taking of their glasses and dressing like whores, but Haig's insertion of the vampire element makes The Radleys far more interesting than other stories of domestic depression.
Peter and Helen suffer from a loveless marriage because they cannont access the thing that brings them the most passion–blood. Rowan and Clara are seen as freaks because they are actually freaks, not because their dirtbag troglodyte classmates look down on quiet teens who like poetry. The vampirism in the story provides a source for the family's problems and, when Clara attacks and kills a teen who tries to take advantage of her (thus forcing her parents to come clean with the truth about their family), vampirism provides the impetus for the family to discover who they really are and finally function as a real family. Plus, there are super-evil, mind-controlling brothers, vampire-hunting secret police, and musing on fictional Booker prize shortlisted novels. You won't find that in any teen paranormal romance. (Well. you might find the first two.)
I won't give much more about the novel away, because I honestly think that The Radleys is a novel whose enjoyment hinges entirely on whether or not books about secret vampires living in a nice country home is something that appeals to you. The novel is much more than a run-of-the-mill vampire story, but a lot of the novel depends on the reader's willingness to accepts that there are a certain few who, by drinking blood, can fly around and carry corpses out to the North Sea. If that's your sort of thing, you'll probably like The Radleys. If it's not, I'd suggest you still give the book a chance. Haig does a wonderful job of pacing his novel with very short chapters. It makes the 350 pages of the novel read like a 137 page novella. There are some predictable twists in the story, and the ending is far too contrived, tying things up in a convenient (and not very Shakespearean-in-magnitude) package.
Best comic book about whoremongering that I've ever read. Parts of the book digress too far into preachy philosophizing about the ethics of prostitution (the appendices are particularly guilty of this), but when Brown focuses on the personal aspect of being a john, the book is great. We get to experience the confusion, the apprehension, and the occasional bouts of shame and self-doubt as Brown experiences them as he visits a variety of prostitutes over years. The personal reflections and thoughts and these events are funny and honest, making the book a pleasure to read. And though I generally prefer coloured comics, this is one comic book I'm glad was drawn in a fairly minimal black-and-white style.
Like reading dumbed-down version of early film theory. McCloud desires to establish comics as a legitimate artistic and narrative medium, and he largely succeeds in doing that. However, he apparently couldn't (or didn't want to) get the rights to use other comics as examples. Because of this, the book operates almost exclusively in the abstract, rather than providing concrete examples to fully explain his theoretical musings.
Not sure there's such a thing as a perfect novel, but this comes pretty damn close. Jones takes a structure that's starting to feel cliche (the multi-perspectives that work so well in [b:A Game of Thrones 13496 A Game of Thrones (A Song of Ice and Fire, #1) George R.R. Martin https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1436732693s/13496.jpg 1466917] and [b:Gone Girl 19288043 Gone Girl Gillian Flynn https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1397056917s/19288043.jpg 13306276] and that now everybody is trying to use) and breaths new life in it. The narrative perspectives aren't a he-said/she-said, they are complementary, meshing together to show us the complexities of love and marriage and family. It's a masterfully structured novel. Definitely should be considered one of the best of 2018.
Blurbs about this book describe it as a Young Adult novel, and I generally don't read YA novels, but Greil Marcus mentioned it in his Real Life Rock Top 10, so I gave it a go. It's a funny novel, but it exists in a strange area between YA and real literature. The novel's plot focuses on Oliver Watson, a fat, stupid, and unpopular 7th grader, who is purposefully stupid and unpopular, as a cover for the fact that he is actually world's 3rd richest man. As a YA novel, there's a good bit about middle school drama, cliques, bullies, and the futile pointlessness of student government elections. As real literature, the novel features a variety of references to Captain Beefheart, Nabokov, Pynchon, Odysseus, A Clockwork Orange, which I think would bit a bit over the head of most young adult readers. Navigating in between these world of young adult zit jokes and bully angst and hipster pop culture references is a tough job, with Lieb managing to do decently enjoyable job of it.
After reading this book, [b:Moby-Dick 153747 Moby-Dick; or, The Whale Herman Melville https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1327940656s/153747.jpg 2409320], [b:In the Heart of the Sea 17780 In the Heart of the Sea The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex Nathaniel Philbrick https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1335902168s/17780.jpg 1640941], and [b:The Terror 3974 The Terror Dan Simmons https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1442713631s/3974.jpg 3025639] (which isn't a whaling story, but it's still about people trapped on a boat), it's clear that a sailing vessel is its own special sort of dystopia. The Volunteer, the main ship in [b:The North Water 25666046 The North Water Ian McGuire https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1456351800s/25666046.jpg 45489184], is an isolated world of violence, rape, betrayal, where the “air is dense with the velvet reek of liquid feces.” Imagine what the characters experience in Cormac McCarthy's [b:The Road 6288 The Road Cormac McCarthy https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1439197219s/6288.jpg 3355573], then take all that and lock it on a ship in the ice floes of the arctic north, and you'll get an idea of what this book is like.
My first instinct is to compare this book to Peter Clines' [b:Ex-Heroes 16479439 Ex-Heroes (Ex-Heroes, #1) Peter Clines https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1360646185s/16479439.jpg 10753679]. Both books deal with superheroes, and both books use an alternating Then/Now structure to show both the actions of the superheroes and how they became superheroes. But where Clines' novel is an escapist action romp, Gonzales takes the last season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (when they go out and find the other potential slayers) and sets it inside a corporate bureaucracy. The action is too dry for my taste, and the homicidal robot arm, while clearly the best part of the book, isn't given nearly the attention it deserves.
The story of an angry chicken with a chip on his shoulder (do chickens have shoulders?), Elmer is a beautifully inventive black-and-white comic book graphic novel that takes place in a world where chickens have the intelligence of humans. Jake, the aforementioned angry chicken, is furious at all the perceived slights and injustices he experiences every day at the hands of humans who do not accept chickens are their equals. After the death of his father, Jakes learns of his family's history–and the history of all chickens who suddenly became sentient–and comes to realize what true suffering and hardship is.
Also, I should mention that this book opens with a chicken masturbating to online photos of a naked human starlet. So, if that's your type of thing, you've got something to look forward to.
A concern in judging translated fiction is where to place the blame for mediocre prose. Battle Royale has a magnificent premise (kids sent to an island and forced to fight to the death in order to survive) and over the 600 pages of the novel, Takami does a great job of managing a cast of dozens and providing a reasonable amount of attention and focus to all the various students on the island. But the way he tells his story, the way he describes the action and the characters, is absolutely dreadful. It reads like something I would write. But because I'm not reading the novel in the original Japanese, it don't know if Takami is to blame, or if this is an example of lazy translation.