“It’s Fine by Me” by Per Petterson  (1992) –  199 pages

 I was halfway through “It’s Fine by Me” and still wavering, still considering quitting the book.  But I stuck with this short novel until the end and I am happy that I did.  

This is an early work by the Norwegian novelist Per Petterson who of course wrote the hugely successful novel “Out Stealing Horses” in 2003. It is the fifth novel by Petterson to be translated into English.  I thought “Out Stealing Horses” was excellent (nearly everyone did), but had not read any of his other novels until this one. 

“It’s Fine by Me” is about a young Norwegian working class teen who lives with his mother.  His father, a violent drunk, has moved out of the house but still hangs around the town    There have been a lot of novels about sensitive young guys brought up in broken abusive homes; I liked that here the young guy, Audun, is no sensitive shrinking violet but is a tough guy willing to fight for himself.  There’s a lot of fighting in this book as you would expect among the young men living in a poorer neighborhood. 

The first sections of the novel switch between scenes from when Audun is 13 and scenes from when he is 18.  At times I couldn’t figure out which sections were which, so the novel just seemed disjointed to me.  Although some of the individual situations were stark and interesting, I couldn’t figure out where Petterson was heading with the entire story.  That is when I wavered at continuing the book. 

However halfway through “It’s Fine by Me”, everything fell into place for me.  This is not a conventional story with a beginning, a middle, and a conclusion; this is a character study of a tough young guy who lives in a rough Norwegian working class neighborhood.  It is about his transition from going to high school to working in a printing factory.  I especially liked the scenes of the straight-from-high-school Audun starting to work on the factory floor, fitting in with the older workers and dealing with his bosses.

One of the strengths of  “It’s Fine by Me” is that you don’t get the sense that the main protagonist Audun is just the author at a young age.  That occurs too many times in novels.  Here Audun stands on his own feet.  No one makes excuses for him.  He is not a particularly good person; he is not a particularly bad person.   He’s a tough guy living in a rough neighborhood who survives at least to the end of the novel.  It rings true, and that is the best thing.

“The Round House” by Louise Erdrich  (2012) –  321 pages

Thirteen year-old Joe is home where his mother struggles back after she is attacked.  She returns from the assault in a stunned daze and retires to her room and stays there for over a week.  Joe and his father, the tribal judge, must fend for themselves. 

“The Round House” is the complete fictional story of the aftermath of this attack.  The story takes place on an Indian reservation in North Dakota in 1988, and as always in the novels and stories of Louise Erdrich, we get a vivid picture of the lives of many of the people who live on or near the reservation.  One man is in his nineties, and he can remember what life was like before being confined to the reservation.  We also meet the boy’s extended family and his close friends and some of the neighbors.  One gets the sense that this is a tight little community these people have and that they watch out for each other.  The entire story is narrated through the eyes and ears of thirteen year-old Joe.  Thirteen is a good age to tell this story in one sense, because the boy is old enough to really be out there in the neighborhood but not so old as to have other more private concerns like high schoolers would have.

 Many of Erdrich’s novels have taken place on this reservation in North Dakota, and she is adept in developing the rich interactions between the people who live there.  There is a lot of humor and a lot of heartbreak in “The Round House”.  Louise Erdrich is often compared to William Faulkner because both writers focus on a little area and its small group of people who live there in novel after novel.  Both Erdrich and Faulkner go deep into their small towns rather than wide.  There are differences between the two writers.  Faulkner is much more portentous and doomful in his writing, while Erdrich is more down-to-earth and sometimes more playful in her writing.  There is a regrettable strain in Faulkner where he foretells the doom he sees in the mixing of the races.  Erdrich makes her stand on race very clear.  These Native Americans who have a strong ancestral bond and who are close-knit in their tribes and families were forced off their land and on to these small reservations.  Yet they still have the tribal and family strengths today.  Erdrich’s great passion is to show the dignity and at the same time the closeness and liveliness of these people living on the reservation, and in this passion she succeeds.

 Having a child narrator, in this case a 13 year-old boy, does present problems especially for me.  A child is more likely to have a simplistic, one-dimensional view of events and might lack the ambiguity and complexity of an adult narrator.  That Erdrich uses the device of having the adult Joe tell this story of what happened when he was 13 did not completely solve this problem for me.   

 However “The Round House” is one of Erdrich’s stronger works, and this is because the entire novel centers on the one incident.  Many novels today are collections of related stories.  The collection type of fiction does have its pleasures, but sometimes the effect is more diffuse; one misses the intensity and depth of a novel which sticks to a single story.    “The Round House” is one well-told story.

“Wish Her Safe at Home” by Stephen Benatar  (1982) – 217 pages

One can well understand the difficulties publishers have had with the fictional work of Stephen Benatar.  In 2007, Benatar attempted to get his second novel “Wish Her Safe at Home”  which was first printed in 1982 republished.   First he went to Penguin Classics and then to 36 (!) other publishers, all of whom turned the book down.  Benatar then self-published 4000 copies of the novel himself under his own Welbeck Classics imprint. 

 The main character of “Wish Her Safe at Home”, Rachel Waring, is a decidedly odd character.  She is 47 years old living with her roommate Sylvia when she inherits a Gregorian mansion in Bristol, England from a strange old aunt.  Rachel decides to move in to the big house rather than sell it. 

 So here we have the story of a plain middle-aged lady remodeling an old house, not exactly the stuff of best-sellerdom.  Lyrics from old songs are strewn throughout the novel, none of them newer that the late 1940s.  The novel is written in somewhat antiquated language with Rachel as narrator.  This is not your typical novel out to please its audience in every possible way.  This is one oddball English book.    

 The perceptive reader will notice early on that the novel is edging into black comedy territory.  (Not to say that the readers of the 37 (!) publishers who rejected the novel lacked perceptivity.)

 However that is not the end of the story.  Consider the following item from Wikipedia.

“He (Benatar) bumped into a man when returning some leftover wine from his book launch, and ask him to look at his book; he was Edwin Franks, the managing editor of  the New York Review of Books publishing arm. Franks “read the book straight away and was knocked out”, and the New York Review of Books published the novel in January 2010.  Screen rights have been bought by a screenwriter who met Benatar in a bookshop.” 

Stephen Benatar is one enterprising author. 

 “Wish Her Safe at Home” is a novel I’ve been wanting to read since John Self’s very positive review way back in 2007 (See the first comment of the 58 comments for the article.).  Also I’ve found that any book republished by NYBR is well worth reading.  This novel fits in well with the other novels on the NYBR Modern Classics list in that it is a quirky individualistic read far off the well-beaten path of more traditional novels.  

 Rachel tells her story in “Wish Her Safe at Home” in a lively and likeable fashion.  The characters she meets at her new house are memorable, and Benatar does have a way with dialogue.  The novel is certainly pleasant and enjoyable scene-by-scene.  Much of the novel is humorous in an idiosyncratic English way.  Sometimes weird unexpected things happen such as Rachel’s strong physical sexual attraction for Roger, the guy who is helping build her garden.

 “Wish Her Safe at Home” is known for its shocking ending which I will not disclose.   For me the ending was not a surprise; Stephen Benatar subtly foreshadows this ending from page one of the novel.

The following poem captures near perfectly a spirit and feeling I often get when I’m writing my blog entries for Tony’s Book World. The poem was written by an unknown Irish poet in the ninth century.   I found this poem in a book called “Lyrics of the Middle Ages” (1959) edited by Hubert Creekmore.   So with no further notes or footnotes except to mention ‘Pangur Ban’ is the name of the poet’s cat, here is the poem.

                                     . 

 Pangur Ban

I and Pangur Ban my cat
‘Tis a like task we are at;
Hunting mice is his delight, 
Hunting words I sit all night.

Better far than praise of men 
‘Tis to sit with book and pen;
Pangur bears me no ill will, 
He too plies his simple skill.

Tis a merry thing to see 
At our tasks how glad are we,
When at home we sit and find 
Entertainment to our mind.

Oftentimes a mouse will stray
In the hero Pangur’s way; 
Oftentimes my keen thought set
Takes a meaning in its net.  

‘Gainst the wall he sets his eye
Full and fierce and sharp and sly; 
‘Gainst the wall of knowledge I
All my little wisdom try. 

When a mouse darts from its den 
O how glad is Pangur then!
O what gladness do I prove 
When I solve the doubts I love!

So in peace our tasks we ply, 
Pangur Ban, my cat and I;
In our arts we find our bliss, 
I have mine and he has his.

Practice every day has made 
Pangur perfect in his trade;
I get wisdom day and night 
Turning darkness into light.

 

“Laura Lamont’s Life in Pictures” by Emma Straub  (2012) – 304 pages

I earlier reviewed favorably Emma Straub’s short story collection “Other People We Married”.  Now she has published her first novel, “Laura Lamont’s Life in Pictures”.  I wish I could say that her new novel is a success, but there are problems with it which prevented it from entirely capturing and holding my interest. 

 As the title indicates, the novel traces Laura Lamont’s  life from her childhood through her Hollywood movie career and after.

 In the 1920s and the 1930s, the Hollywood movie industry became huge.  The studios needed many new actors and actresses to fill the over 800 movies that were being made each year. Young performers such as Judy Garland and Barbara Stanwyck who already had some stage experience as children were in demand and had a leg up on others who didn’t have that childhood training.  In ‘Laura Lamont’, our young girl’s parents own and run the local Cherry County Playhouse in Door County in eastern Wisconsin, so she appears in shows at an early age and thus is comfortable on stage.  When she runs away from home and heads to Hollywood as a teenager, she is ready.

 While many Hollywood novels have characters that are larger than life in their talents, their loves, and their excesses, here Laura Lamont is more the ordinary small town young woman achieving and confronting her success.  All events and characters are seen through her eyes, and eventually I found her point of view mundane and less than scintillating.  Up until her Hollywood success, I was carried along in the novel with the momentum of her screen career.  However Laura Lamont reaches the peak of her career already in the first half of the novel, and after that there is the long slow winding down and I lost interest.   She also tediously keeps repeating the same points in her interior monologue which makes up most of the novel.

 In a lengthy chapter Laura returns home to Door County for her father’s funeral. This could have been presented in many exciting over-the-top ways, the Hollywood star returning to her small town roots.  Here we mainly get tiresome introspection.  There were no scenes earlier in the novel that showed any special closeness between the father and daughter.  Thus when during the funeral trip home, Laura has some insights into her father’s life, these insights seem unearned and unnecessary.

 Also there are just altogether too many deaths and funerals and near-deaths in the novel, and very few bright colorful scenes that you would expect in a Hollywood novel.

 “Laura Lamont” is not a bad novel; it is just not as lively and exciting as a Hollywood novel could be.  As a personality, Laura Lamont is relentlessly average and dull.  I would have preferred a more vivid main character, scandals and all.  Perhaps if instead of depicting the actress’s entire life, we were presented only with a few dramatic scenes, the novel would have come alive.    

 Emma Straub seemed here to be going through the motions of writing a novel; next time she should find a subject that intensely interests her.  I’ve read several novels this year, ‘Perla’ by Carolina de Robertis and ‘Underground Time’ be Delphine de Vigan come immediately to mind, where the author’s intensity pulls the reader in.

First, before the list, two quotes. 

“The superior man understands what is right; the inferior man understands what will sell.” – Confucius

“”The nine-to-five is one of the greatest atrocities sprung upon mankind. You give your life away to a function that doesn’t interest you. This situation so repelled me that I was driven to drink, starvation, and mad females, simply as an alternative.” – Charles Bukowski    

 “Player Piano” by Kurt Vonnegut (1952) – A near-future where everything is made by robots or machines, eliminating the need for human workers.  Are we there yet? 

 “Babbitt” by Sinclair Lewis (1922)  –  Babbitt is his name and real estate sales is his game.  A realistic satire of a businessman and his city.  Is Zenith actually Minneapolis?

 “A Regular Guy” by Mona Simpson (1997) – A novel about a Silicon Valley entrepreneur written by Steven Jobs’ actual younger sister. 

 “A Hologram for the King” by Dave Eggers (2012) – Who knew that Saudis and Americans working together would be so funny? 

  “Buddenbrooks” by Thomas Mann (1901) –  a great classic novel about a wealthy German merchant family and their trade business (perhaps even better than ‘The Magic Mountain’). 

 “Germinal” by Emile Zola (1885) – A realistic hellish story about a coalminers’ strke in northern France.

 “Underground Time” by Delphine de Vigan (2012) – Office politics are not so nice when they move you to an office that shares a wall with the men’s bathroom. 

 “Something Happened” by Joseph Heller (1974) – A novel about a businessman by the author who invented the ‘Catch-22’ rules.

 “Gain” by Richard Powers (1998) –  The fictional corporate history of the Claire International chemical company and a present-day lawsuit brought by someone living near their factory. 

 “Moral Hazard” by Kate Jennings (2002) – A moving novel about a financial speechwriter on Wall Street written by a financial speechwriter on Wall Street.  

 “Factotum” by Charles Bukowski (1975) – a necessary corrective for anyone who thinks the work world is glamorous and exciting rather than what it really is.    See above.

 “The Intuitionist” by Colson Whitehead (1999) – A novel about an elevator inspector who belongs to the ‘Intuitionist’ school of elevator inspecting rather than the ‘Empiricist’ school of elevator inspecting.

“Underground Time” by Delphine de Vigan   (2009) – 257 pages

Translated by George Miller 

 “Underground Time” by Delphine de Vigan is a novel about one of the most severe hidden problems of modern life, a problem that is hardly spoken of yet has devastating effects on many people.  That problem is harsh company or office politics.

  In a well-run company or office, everyone works together for the success of the group.  Each person from the bottom to the top has a role to perform, and management is there to make sure that each person is treated with respect and that everyone works together to achieve the goals.

 That is how a well-run company or office performs.  However there are many, many companies or offices which are not well-run, that are in fact poorly run.  What happens in a poorly run organization?   Managers are allowed to play favorites.  Some of their employees, their pets, get preferential treatment and are allowed to get away with just about anything while other employees are ostracized, shunned, treated unfairly because they are not the bosses’ pets or are on their bosses’ ‘shit’ list.

 All the employees can see what is going on in their department, but there isn’t much they can do about it.  The bosses’ preferred employees get to lord it over everybody else.  The people who see what is going on can’t or won’t speak, because they want to stay in their positions, and are scared they will lose their jobs.  Morale suffers.  Instead of a team working together, you have a wild pack of hyenas. 

 “Underground Time” is a vivid portrayal of this common problem in modern society.    Mathilde is the Deputy Director of Marketing at a large international food company.  She likes her job and gets along well with her boss until one day she contradicts her boss at a meeting.  From then on, everything changes.  Her boss refuses to talk to her, doesn’t invite her to meetings.  Other employees she thought were her friends shun her.  Pretty soon the boss moves her to an office that shares a wall with the men’s toilet and is far away from the boss’s office.   Mathilde takes her problem down to Human Resources to little avail.   

 Having worked in modern offices, some good and some bad, for most of my life, I was especially happy and gratified to read a novel that deals as directly and vividly with the problem of brutal office politics.   This novel is extremely well-done. 

 There is a parallel story going on in the novel about a man who loves his girlfriend, but his girlfriend doesn’t love him.  However the office politics story really dominates the novel.  Delphine probably would have been better off writing separate novellas for each of the two stories, but I can’t say that the two stories really detract from each other. 

 In 2009, the two novels *Underground Time’ by Delphine de Vigan and “Three Strong Women” by Marie N’Diaye were competing for the Goncourt Prize, the most prestigious literary award in France.  There were other novels on the short list, but these two were the main competitors.  I have now read both novels, and both are excellent.  I myself probably would have given the award to “Underground Time”, because it is a vivid portrayal of one of my main concerns, brutal office politics.  However the 2009 Goncourt Prize went to “Three Strong Women”, and I have no problem with that.  Both novels show how vital and alive literature is today. 

 Thanks to Caroline of Beauty is A Sleeping Cat for bringing “Underground Time” to my attention.

“The Princess of Cleves” by Madame de la Fayette (1676) – 202 pages    Translated by Nancy Mitford

“The Princess of Cleves” gives us an inside view of the French royal court in the sixteenth century.  Although Madame de la Fayette wrote the novel around 1676, the time portrayed in the novel is about 1558 when Henry II was king of France and Elizabeth was just beginning her reign as Queen of England.  In fact one of the main characters of “The Princess of Cleves”, the Duc de Nemours, is considered a major potential suitor for Elizabeth.  However he turns away from Elizabeth due to his magnetic attraction to the great beauty of the Princess of Cleves. 

 The novel is quite historically accurate about this time in French history, yet much of the novel is made up of court gossip.  It seems that nearly all the men and women in the royal court of France, including the King himself, have someone on the side besides their husband or wife.

 “The Court gravitated round ambition and love, the chief occupations of men and women alike, for there were so many factions and intrigues, and the women played so large a part in them, that love and politics were inseparable.  Tranquility, indifference, boredom, and idleness were unknown; everybody was busily trying to better their position by pleasing, by helping, by hindering somebody else.  The occupations of the day were pleasures and plots.”      

For many of the women, love and sex were a strategy for improving their position within the Royal Court.   

Our heroine marries a man who is deeply in love with her and she thus becomes the Princess of Cleves. However she is somewhat apathetic toward her new husband.  She likes him, doesn’t love him.  However when the Princess meets the other young gentleman, the Duc de Nemours, the night before her wedding, they both fall deeply in love with each other immediately on sight.  Yes the Duc falls in love with her too, but you really must question his motives.  Is he just playing with the Princess’s affections?  He is a single man about town who could have any woman he wants, even the young Queen of England.  He constantly puts the Princess of Cleves in embarrassing compromising situations, and her husband soon suspects that there is an attraction there.  Duc de Nemours follows the Princess around almost to the point of stalking.  The Princess resists his advances, but he can tell by her blushes that she is strongly attracted to him.  

 For us United States readers who probably grew up on “Little House on the Prairie” and “The Scarlet Letter”, the novel “The Princess of Cleves” is quite raunchy stuff.  It is hard for us to imagine that back in the sixteenth century these men and women of the royal court were having so many of these not-so-secret love affairs.  Yes, this is a raunchy sexy French novel.    In a way it is quite interesting that there were times in world history when the Puritans were not in the ascendancy. 

 In 2005, former French president Nicolas Sarkozy said, “A sadist or an idiot, you decide, included questions about ‘La Princesse de Cleves’ in the exam for public sector jobs…. “   In protest, there were mass readings of “The Princess of Cleves” at the Sorbonne and other major French universities.   Sales of the novel soared.

“This is How You Lose Her” by Junot Diaz  (2012) –  213 pages

None of the stories in Junot Diaz’ new collection of stories is called “This is How You Lose Her”, so this title must be the theme for the book.  Indeed several of the stories are about a young Domo (a Dominican Republic guy; a Dominican Republic gal is called a Dominica) who loses his girlfriend for some reason. 

The magnificent first story, “The Sun, the Moon, the Stars”, has precisely this theme.  Our young guy, a ‘sucio’ (a womanizer) , cheats on his girlfriend Magdalena, and she finds out about it after.  They stay together, but somehow everything has changed.  A door has closed, and there is no way for him to open it again.  

I spent some time looking for the quintessential Junot Diaz sentence, but found out his effect is cumulative, sentence building on sentence.

Here is a typical example. 

“Mama tried to keep his ass home.  Remember what the doctor said, hijo.  But he just said, Ta to, Mom, ta to, and danced right out the door.  She never could control him.  With me she yelled and cursed and hit, but with him she sounded as if she was auditioning for a role in a Mexican novela.”

Many of the stories are about the two brothers, Yunior and Rafa, and their mother.  As I recall many of the stories in Diaz’s first story collection, “Drown” were also about Yunior, Rafa, and their mother.   Most of the stories take place in New Jersey or Massachusetts.    Junot Diaz fully captures the colorful adventures of young Dominican-American guys and gals, and his books have already become a lasting part of our literary canon.  Despite all these stories being fine, I do believe it is time for Diaz to move on to different stories.  I felt the stories in “This is How You Lose Her” are quite similar to the stories in “Drown”, and the stories within this collection are quite similar to each other.  Surely the stories could still be about the Dominican-American experience, just be about something different from the dating life.

I realize that releasing a book of stories is an American writer’s version of treading water, but I’ll be expecting something new and different in the next novel by Junot Diaz.      .

“Beautiful Ruins” by Jess Walter  (2912)  –  352 pages

“Beautiful Ruins” is the perfect example of a novel which is climbing up the best seller lists, but which as a literary work of fiction is laughably bad. 

 I started reading “Beautiful Ruins”, because after reading several very positive reviews, I figured this might be one of those rare novels that make the best seller lists yet still have some literary quality.  Such was not the case. 

 “Beautiful Ruins” begins with the arrival by boat of the beautiful but dying young American actress Dee Moray to the tiny Italian seacoast village of Porto Vergogna.  There we meet the cute, quirky, but lovable stock Italians who live in this tiny village (Italy ought to sue).   Our actress stays at the Adequate View inn which is run by the cute but lovable young Italian man Pasquale Tursi.  He is happy to have the American actress staying there, since the only other American who has stayed at the inn is the handsome but alcoholic Hemingway-esque author Alvis Bender who comes each year to write his war novel (Has there ever been a writer in a bad novel who was not Hemingway-esque?).  Due to his alcoholism and his war memories which have scarred him, Bender has only completed one chapter of his novel.  

“Beautiful Ruins” let’s us read that one chapter of Bender’s war novel.  Frankly, this war story is so trite and hackneyed; if I were the author I would have quit writing it long before I reached the end of the first chapter.

The year is 1962, and the actress Dee Moray is in Italy to act in a small role in the movie ‘Cleopatra’ which is filming there with its major actors Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton.   Thus we meet the conniving double-dealing movie producer Michael Deane.  Soon we are flashing forward to modern-day Hollywood so we can admire the entire span of Michael Deane’s career from producing bad movies like ‘Cleopatra’ to producing bad TV reality shows.  So of course, “Beautiful Ruins” gives us a chapter from Michael Deane’s autobiography which is about as awe-inspiring as his pathetic career.

Since we are now in Hollywood, “Beautiful Ruins” subjects us to a movie ‘treatment’ called “Donner” about the ill-fated frontier Donner party.  I suppose this represents all the bad scripts and treatments that are floating around Hollywood, and in that sense it succeeds.   

Later we again skip forward to nearly the present to meet Dee Moray’s son, Pat Bender, who is a tortured, sensitive rebellious rock musician who abuses drugs and alcohol and who is hugely attractive to women.  

“Beautiful Ruins” quotes the dumb-ass sappy lyrics to his best and most famous song, ‘Lydia’, which is about the woman he truly loves while he is screwing all these other sluts.  Later his life is turned into a dumb-ass play ‘Front Man’ of which, luckily for us readers, only parts of acts I and III are in “Beautiful Ruins”.  

So “Beautiful Ruins” is a bunch of stereotypes on top of a pile of clichés.  While reading, I kept a running count of all the original thoughts and authentic feelings that are contained in “Beautiful Ruins”.  The final count was zero.

“The Successor” by Ismail Kadare   (2003) – 207 pages  Translated by David Bellos via Papavrami (French translation)

“The Successor” is a crystal-clear novel about the mysterious death of the number-two man in the tyrannical dictatorship that ruled Albania.  The official line is that the death of this leader is a suicide, but questions quickly arise.  Despite the cover, it is more of a political novel than a detective novel. Here is the first paragraph: 

The Designated Successor was found dead in his bedroom at dawn on December 14.  Albanian television made a brief announcement of the facts at noon:  “During the night of December 13, the successor succumbed to a nervous depression and took his own life with a firearm.” 

 This novel is a family drama with the dead leader’s wife, daughter, and son being main characters.  They live in a luxurious house which is located near the house of the absolute dictator (‘the Guide’) himself.  The architect of the house gets involved because there is a locked tunnel from the absolute dictator’s house to the number-two man’s house which can only be unlocked from the dictator’s side of the tunnel.

 This story is based to some unknown extent on a real incident that occurred in Albania in 1981 when the Albanian Prime Minister Mehmet Shehu was reported to have committed suicide in December 1981 and was subsequently denounced as a ‘traitor’ to Albania. 

 The writing is as plain and clear as a bell expressing the stark events which occur and the thoughts and feelings of this family.  The novel came to us via the tortuous route of an English translation by David Bellos from the French translation by Papavrami from the original Albanian.   Despite all, I suspect that the novel was written in this simple style to begin with. There is an elegance to the telling of this story that makes the novel powerful to read.  

 There is some criticism of Ismail Kadare on the Internet because he was never imprisoned during the many years of the Albanian dictatorship, while other famous writers who lived in Communist dictatorships such as Milan Kundera, Vaclev Havel, and Imre Kertesz spent time in prison.  Albania had one of the most rigid and tyrannical dictatorships in Eastern Europe, and a writer who opposed the dictator may have been not only imprisoned, but also tortured and executed.  Not having been there in Albania at that time, I really can’t fault Ismail Kadare.

 What I can say is that “The Successor” is a strong stark depiction of the Albanian dictatorship during the Communist years, and the world is fortunate to have Kadare here to testify on those years.  Ismail Kadare was the first winner of the Man Booker International Prize.  I fully agree with the choice of Kadare ahead of subsequent winners Chinua Achebe, Alice Munro, and Philip Roth; his writing is that good.    

“The Successor”, along with “Palace of Dreams”, is an excellent introduction to the writing of Ismail Kadare.

“A Hologram for the King” by Dave Eggers  (2012) – 312 pages

 This book is just what the world needed, a humorous satirical novel about Americans doing business in Saudi Arabia.  Our man Alan Clay learned the secrets of selling products on his first job working for Fuller Brush Company using the four prime motivators to get people to buy things.

 Money! Romance! Self-Preservation!  Recognition!

  Later he had a good career as a sales executive for Schwinn Bicycle Company, a fine old American business, but then the company decided to move their main factory down South to avoid paying union wages.  That was not a success as the workers had never built bicycles before and besides they were soon underpriced by Chinese factories.  Then Schwinn moved their bicycle production to China, but once the Chinese team learned to make bicycles, what did they need Schwinn for?

 “More efficient without unions, cut ‘em out.  More efficient without American workers, period, cut ‘em out.  Why didn’t I see it coming.  More efficient without me too.”         

So now Alan Clay is 54, almost broke, divorced, and just hanging on in the business world using those old sales techniques that got him started. Most of the actual things get made in China, while we’re making websites and holograms.  So now he’s over in Saudi Arabia selling a holographic program to King Abdullah who is jetting all over the world, while Alan and his team are set up in a tent in the nearly deserted new town of ‘King Abdullah Economic City (KAEC)’  waiting for the King so they can put on their demonstration.

 Besides being a business satire, “A Hologram for the King” is a buddy story as Alan Clay becomes great friends with his driver Yousef.  Yousef has woman problems.  His ex-wife is texting him, and Yousef thinks her new wealthy jealous husband is trying to kill him.   As they drive around Alan tells Yousef these old dirty jokes he’d heard during his long sales career.  That’s a quality I like about Dave Eggers’ writing; he throws in things to make this novel fun.  Saudis are just like us except quite a few of them have a lot more money.

 This novel reads very quickly and it is a light fun story that does make its points about our modern world of business.  Novels about the world of business are quite rare, and “A Hologram for the King” is probably the best business novel I’ve read since “Something Happened” by Joseph Heller or “Babbitt” by Sinclair Lewis.

The John Cheever Audio Collection

“The deep joy we take in the company of people with whom we have just recently fallen in love is undisguisable.”  –  John Cheever

“The telling of lies is a sort of sleight of hand that displays our deepest feelings about life.” – John Cheever in a 1969 interview with the Paris Review

“I still lack a political, religious and philosophical world view—I change it every month—and so I’ll have to limit myself to descriptions of how my heroes love, marry, give birth, die, and how they speak.  –  Anton Chekhov at age 28

John Cheever could very well have written the above sentence from Anton Chekhov.  In his stories Cheever was the chronicler of everyday suburban life in the middle of the twentieth century.  Cheever’s suburbia is about as far removed from our suburbs of today as was the French royal court in the sixteenth century (Forgive me, I’m also reading ‘The Princess of Cleves’ by Madame de Lafayette).  For one thing Cheever’s suburb is distinctly upper class where nearly every house has a swimming pool.  Each summer weekend there are cocktail parties by the swimming pools where the neighbors are invited.   And just like at the French royal court, the rich people in Cheever’s stories are fascinated by and indulge in extra-marital and illicit love affairs.

 Cheever’s stories are realistic mixed with a heavy dose of irony.  To make my point about irony, I will examine one story in particular, “The Brigadier and the Golf Widow”.  The story begins with a couple named the Pasterns admiring their brand new nuclear fallout shelter.  This fixes the story in time as there was a fad in the early Sixties for home owners to build their own fallout shelters.  Then Mrs. Pastern tells her husband to visit two homes to collect for her charity, since the people were not there when she went around the first time.  Mr. Pastern goes to the Flanagan’s where only the Mrs. is home.  She invites him in for drinks and after six drinks, she invites him upstairs to her bedroom.  Mr. Pastern has done this kind of thing many times before, but Mrs. Flanagan says, “I’ve never done this before.”  Mr. Pastern and Mrs. Flanagan get together a few more times, and then Mrs. Flanagan makes a demand on him.  She wants a key to his fallout shelter, and he winds up giving her a key.  Mrs. Pastern finds out about this gift through the neighborhood gossip.  Mrs. Pastern has been aware of his many infidelities before and forgiven him to some extent.  However Mrs. Pastern can not forgive him for giving this strange woman the key to their own fallout shelter.    .

 Nearly every story in this Cheever collection has some ironic twist.  Sometimes you feel that Cheever is laughing at his suburban characters. It is a gentle humane laughter, but he does make his points.   It is Cheever’s imagination that takes these stories several steps above straight realism to somewhere more poignant and meaningful.  It is Cheever’s sense of irony and parody as well as the energy of his writing that make each of these stories an event in itself.   It is amazing how Cheever can capture such a strong sense of a person’s or persons’ lives within ten to twenty pages.

 This is the year of John Cheever’s centenary.  I listened to each of the twelve stories in this audio collection twice.  Even though most of the stories have a suburban setting, each is a world onto itself, totally different from the rest.  As I said before, these stories go well beyond realism into irony, parody, and symbolism.   As many of the famous writers of the middle and late twentieth century fall by the wayside, John Cheever will remain part of the literary canon.

“Journalism” by Joe Sacco  (2012)  –  190 pages

 Here is something new and different.  Usually comics are light, humorous takes on life.  However these comics by Joe Sacco are deadly serious.

 Joe Sacco goes to the worst trouble spots in the world, interviews people there, and then writes comics about them to enlighten people on what’s really going on.  Sacco calls his work ‘comic journalism’.  Although he realizes that comics by their very nature are subjective, he attempts to present an honest picture of each situation.  In each of these volatile situations there are the powerful and the weak, and in many cases, they become the oppressors and the oppressed.   

 Here are the trouble spots covered in this book.

The war crimes trials at The Hague to sort out the atrocities committed during the Bosnian War

         The conflict between Israelis and Palestinians in Hebron

         The displacement of refugees from Chechnya during the war there   

         The Iraq War

         The African migration to Malta

         The plight of the Dalits (formerly the Untouchables) in India

 “Journalism” was remedial reading for me.  I must admit that I don’t keep up on what’s going on in these troubled areas of the world.  I spend my time reading mostly fiction which is more enjoyable for me.  I suppose there is a natural tendency to avoid these desperate situations.  This book is a relatively painless way for one to keep informed, much less difficult than reading newspaper or magazine articles.

 “Underneath the India of billionaires and Bollywood stars, the India whose growth rate rivals China’s, is a country in which more than three-quarters of the population – 836 million people – live on less than half a dollar a day and where the prevalence of underweight children is nearly double of Sub-Saharan Africa.

I had no idea.

 The United States is included in these comics with three articles about the Iraq War.  Two of these articles have never been published in the United States before.  The last of these articles is about two Iraqi businessmen who are plaintiffs in a lawsuit against former US Defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld that alleges “torture or other cruel, inhuman, or degrading punishment” while they were in US military custody.

 The longest comic – 48 pages – is called “The Unwanted”, and it is about the many fleeing African refugees who wind up in Malta, an island just south of Italy. This is one crisis area with which I was totally unfamiliar. This story probably had special meaning for Joe Sacco, since he is a Maltese-American.  He frequently includes drawings of himself as he is interviewing the various people for his stories.

 These comic strips are a good way to keep up with the world.

“The Empty Glass” by J. I. Baker  (2012) –  325 pages

Now that fifty years have gone by since Marilyn Monroe died on August 1, 1962. it must be time for her death to be turned into a dark noir fiction just as the death of Elizabeth Short, the Black Dahlia murder fifteen years earlier, has been turned into several noir novels and movies.  “The Empty Glass” by J. I. Baker is a dark noir fiction based on the death of Marilyn Monroe.  

 The plotting here is pretty standard stuff for noir fiction.  It’s like J. I. Baker wanted to touch all the noir bases without adding anything original of his own.  I would call ‘The Empty Glass’ a ‘Coroner Procedural’ just as some novels are called ‘Police Procedurals’. Our main character Ben Fitzgerald here is a deputy coroner.   The first time our hero encounters Marilyn Monroe is when he helps perform an autopsy on her lifeless corpse. 

 Did Marilyn Monroe commit suicide or was she murdered?  That is the main question of “The Empty Glass”.  Certain details from the autopsy were suspicious such as Marilyn supposedly took all these big pills, but the empty glass near her bed had not been used recently.  Also her body was in a position which would indicate that it had been moved. Also there is a six hour gap between the time her body was discovered at 10:30 PM and the time the authorities were called at 4:25 AM. 

 Inevitably the story revolves around the Kennedys especially Robert who happened to be in the area at a Hollywood house party with Rat Pack friends Frank Sinatra and Kennedy’s brother-in-law Peter Lawford.  Robert had apparently broken off his affair with Marilyn a few weeks earlier.  He showed up at Marilyn’s apartment in the afternoon before the night she died, and they had a big fight.  Marilyn resented being passed from brother to brother and then dropped entirely.  Robert Kennedy was tired of her constant attempts to reach him and his brother John.

 The dialogue in “The Empty Glass” is short and snappy as you would expect in a noir novel. 

 “You started with us as . . .”

“Deputy Coroner.  Suicide Notes and Weapons.  I was an embalmer before.’

“So you wanted a change.”

“The truth is I wanted more money.  My son was born.  I needed it.  So I took the civil service exam and the walk-through test.”

“The walk-through test?”

“You have to walk through this place and not pass out.” 

There are also hard-as-nails scenes about Ben’s personal life, all pretty routine tough-guy stuff for a noir novel, beatings by Rat Pack bodyguard thugs, sticky sentimental encounters with his seven year old son, etc.   These are only a sidelight, not the main plot line.    

 There’s a lot of stuff on the Internet regarding the death of Marilyn Monroe mystery and room for questions about what happened.   J. I. Baker seems to take a lot of pleasure in trashing the Kennedys.  He even falls out of his noir style so he can more carefully conjecture the Kennedy involvement. I question the author’s motives but realize this is strictly fiction.  Was this supposed to be a Hollywood mystery or an anti-Kennedy screed?  What starts our as a dark noir turns into a nasty political novel.

“Three Strong Women” by Marie Ndiaye  (2009)  – 293 pages    Translated by John Fletcher

The English translation of “Three Strong Women” by French author Marie Ndiaye was published here in the United States last month.  This collection of three novellas won the most prestigious French literary prize, the Prix Goncourt, in 2009 and since then has won the International Literature Prize and the European Literature Prize. 

 The title is a bit of a misnomer since the main characters of the first and third novellas are women, but the main character of the long second novella is a man.  Perhaps the author is referring to the man’s wife.

 In each of the three novellas Marie Ndiaye puts you deep inside the head of the main character.  These are all very emotional stories involving family.  There is a lot of anger, bitterness, pain, and remorse in these stories.  In the first story, the daughter is the main character and she was rejected at an early age by her wheeler-dealer father who is “deeply shocked and repelled by ugliness” even in his own daughters.  She went on to become a lawyer.  In the second story a husband is the main character, and his wife had an affair with his boss two years before; the husband is terribly afraid the affair is continuing.   This story is a one-day trip into the deranged depths of existence, into hell.  In the third story a woman is kicked out of her in-laws’ house after her husband dies, because she was unable to bear any children during the three years they were married.  It is those closest to us who can hurt us the most, and we can in turn hurt them the most. 

–

I’m very impressionable while I’m reading novels, easily influenced by feelings and actions within a story.  I don’t remain cool, calm, or collected or objective or detached when reading these intense stories.  That is the strength of the stories; they make you feel the anger and the pain.  Ndiaye is masterful in conveying the situations in which these strong emotions originate.  This is not an easy book; the sentences are sometimes long and involved, and the intensity of reading just a few pages at a time wore me out.  However the writing is of a high quality and definitely worth the effort. 

These affecting stories are not for the faint of heart.  Impressionable as I am, perhaps I identified too closely with this guy in the second story who is on the edge of insanity for the entire story.  Strong as this story is, reading this story was almost too painful for me.

These are powerful novellas.  Can you handle them?  I almost couldn’t.

Truth Like the Sun” by Jim Lynch  (2012) –  254 pages

 “It didn’t seem fair or accurate to me.  I didn’t recognize the man they wrote about.  Life is a challenging and often inexplicable odyssey that doesn’t translate easily into newspaper stories.”   

. 

Even though the characters in this novel are entirely fictional, “Truth Like the Sun” is very much a journalistic novel with all the good and not-so-good qualities that means.  One of the main characters is a journalist, the other is a politician and the writing in the novel has a lot in common with good newspaper writing. 

 Fifty years ago in 1962, the Seattle World’s Fair was going strong.  This was perhaps a high point in United States optimism.  We had a new young President in John F. Kennedy.  The Space Race was in its early stages with John Glenn’s flight orbiting the Earth only months earlier.  The Vietnam War hadn’t started yet.  And this was the Mad Men era. 

 The Seattle Space Needle was built for the fair.  The Space Needle is still the tallest structure in Seattle, and contains a rotating restaurant on its top which is still in business.  It originally rotated once every hour but since then has been speeded up to accommodate more restaurant customers.   Elvis Presley even filmed a movie at the Seattle Fair while it was in progress, “It Happened at the World’s Fair’.

 “Truth Like the Sun” by Jim Lynch is very much a Seattle novel.  Chapters of the novel which take place during the 1962 World’s Fair alternate with chapters which take place in Seattle in 2001. .  I preferred the World’s Fair chapters over the others, perhaps because the Fair still has a glow in my mind.  The novel’s plot concerns one of the movers and shakers responsible for putting together the World’s Fair in 1962 running for mayor of Seattle in 2001.

 As I stated before, this is a journalistic novel.  The ‘who, what, where, when, why, and how’ are all presented clearly and lucidly in steady prose   The entire story is laid out precisely and in an easy-to-follow fashion.  It reminded me of the Fletcher Knebel and Charles Bailey novels such as “Seven Days in May” and “Convention” which I read in high school/ 

 So what is missing?  The first sentence above which I quoted from the novel is as good as any explanation of what is missing in this novel.  Missing are those qualities of life which are inexplicable and a mystery.  These are the flaky idiosyncratic qualities that separate great art from journalism.   Journalism and reporting are just too rational to capture life in its entirety. 

 Maybe the best example I can give is when Elvis Presley shows up in the novel.  There’s a fair amount of dialogue involving Elvis, but it never captures the down-home sincerity and backwoods humor of the real Elvis.   In the novel, Elvis doesn’t seem to talk much differently from the other characters.

 “Truth Like the Sun” is quite a good novel, but doesn’t quite capture the wondrous strangeness of life.

“The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry” by Rachel Joyce  (2012)  –  320 pages   Read by Jim Broadbent

While I was reading “The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry”, this exceptional novel reminded me of another story of an old man’s redemption, Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol”.  Nearly every Christmas I try to make room for some version of “A Christmas Carol”, my favorite being the 1951 Alastair Sim movie.  The story of the transformation of the old man Ebenezer Scrooge is so powerful, it holds up with repeated tellings and viewings.   After reading “Harold Fry”, I was so moved I am willing to put this new novel about the redemption of an old man, Harold Fry, and his wife, Maureen, in the same league as “A Christmas Carol”. It is a phenomenally affecting story.

 I listened to “Harold Fry” on audio book which is probably the ideal format for the novel.  Rachel Joyce wrote and acted in radio plays before she wrote this first novel, so the audio fits her perfectly.    The publisher hired big name actor Jim Broadbent to read the novel, so they knew very early on that they had a winner on their hands.  

 The premise of “Harold Fry” is very simple.  One day Harold Fry receives a letter from an old friend he used to work with, Queenie Hennessy , who is writing to tell him that she is dying of cancer.  Harold Fry writes a short response and goes to mail it.  On the way to the mailbox, he realizes his response is inadequate. He decides instead to go past the mailbox and walk all the way from Kingsbridge in southern England to Berwick-upon-Tweed in northern England to see Queenie in person, to save her life by ‘putting one foot in front of the other’.

 Harold and his wife Maureen have been in a rut for many years, and Harold’s decision to walk these 500+ miles jolts them both so they can look at all things anew.   Harold and Maureen as well as their neighbor Rex are all very middle-class English, and there is a lot of humor in their interactions.  As you would expect of someone who writes radio plays, Rachel Joyce has a perfect ear for dialogue.      

 Along the way, Harold meets many people who all admire his single-minded decision to make this long walking trek to save Queenie.  All that I’ve mentioned so far occurs in the first few pages, and I won’t give away any more of the plot.  Let’s just say that occasionally when I read a novel my eyes will fill with tears, but it is very rare that I will actually start bawling with the emotion of it all.  “Harold Fry” is that kind of novel.

 I suppose this long walk by Harold Fry could be considered an allegory, but it is so grounded in reality it doesn’t feel like an allegory.  It also reminded me of another trip in a famous story.  In “The Swimmer” by John Cheever, our hero decides to cross from one end of his suburban city to the other, swimming across every swimming pool he encounters.  In both ‘The Swimmer” and “Harold Fry” the protagonist’s trip is not just a trip; it has a more profound significance.   .

 While listening to this novel, I hung on to nearly every word.  Having read so many novels before, I always look for missteps by the author, things that detract.  There were none here.  Every scene is exactly as you want it to be.  That is why I believe that “Harold Fry” will become a classic.   I can see people still reading “Harold Fry” many years from now, still drawn by its emotional power.  The scenes and dialogue make “Harold Fry ideal movie material, and with the right director and actors, it could be excellent.  

 A few days ago the 2012 Man-Booker longlist was released; there were so many names of authors on the list I had never heard of that I felt apathetic and indifferent about the list.  After reading “Harold Fry”, I no longer am apathetic or indifferent.

“Words in Air” – The Complete Correspondence between Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop  edited by Thomas Travisand with Saskia Hamilton  (2008) – 877 pages

 “I think of you daily and feel anxious lest we lose our old backward and forward flow that always seems to open me up and bring color and peace. ”      Robert Lowell

 “Please never stop writing me letters – they always manage to make me feel like my higher self (I’ve been re-reading Emerson) for several days…”    Elizabeth Bishop

The letters exchanged between Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop form one of  the great poetic correspondences of the twentieth century.  They met at a dinner party hosted by poet and critic Randall Jarrell in 1947, and they continued to exchange 459 letters for the next 30 years.  At the beginning they were somewhat romantically involved, though Elizabeth Bishop was rightfully cautious, for Robert Lowell was a severely bipolar manic depressive (in Lowell’s own word, ‘over-exuberance’) who was confined to mental hospitals five times during the 1950s alone.  It is amazing how sane Lowell comes across in these letters.  In fact when Lowell and Bishop met, he was getting divorced from his first wife, fiction writer Jean Stafford, who had sued him for her facial disfigurement which resulted from a car accident that had occurred before they were married when Lowell was in one of his manic phases.

        “I’m tired.  Everybody’s tired of my turmoil.” – Robert Lowell. “Eye and Tooth”

In 1950 Robert Lowell married Elizabeth Hardwick, and in 1951 Elizabeth Bishop left for Brazil where she met and lived with female architect Lota de Macedo Soares.  Elizabeth Bishop stayed in Brazil for 16 years, and on the day Bishop and Soares returned to New York City in 1967, Soares committed suicide by overdosing on tranquilizers.

 All my life I have lived and behaved very much like [the] sandpiper–just running down the edges of different countries and continents, ‘looking for something’, having spent most of my life timorously seeking for subsistence along the coastlines of the world.  –  Elizabeth Bishop 

Although Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop were very compatible in their letters critiquing each other’s poems and relating humorous gossip about their mutual literary friends, they did not see that much of each other, which is probably fortunate, because it probably would have been much more turbulent if they had physically gotten together.

“We seem attached to each other by some stiff piece of wire, so that each time one moves, the other moves in another direction.”   – Robert Lowell, in the correspondence

 In a later reminiscence of Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop writes the following.

 “He has a way in conversation, sometimes in prose writing or letters (I might quote from a letter or two to show what I mean here) of prefacing a name with adjective piled on adjective – I like this very much; sometimes I disagree with an adjective or two, but usually the others will be accurate, surprising, maybe, but suddenly new and absolutely right – you can take your choice – “

 In their correspondence Lowell usually addresses Bishop as “Dearest Elizabeth” and Bishop addresses Lowell as “Dearest Cal”.  Both Lowell and Bishop usually ended their letters with “With much love”, although in one letter Bishop ends with “with much love always and congratulations and everything”.

“Office Girl” by Joe Meno  (2012)  –  289 pages

I expect this review of “Office Girl” will be quite short, because I rarely read novels that are as inconsequential as this one.  “Office Girl” is the story of Jack and Odile, a guy and a girl in their early twenties who work at a phone bank for a telemarketer in Chicago in 1999.  Both Odile and Jack consider themselves artists, and they are open to doing playful and weird artistic things which is probably why they hook up in the first place.

 Early on while listening to the audio book of “Office Girl”, I almost gave up on it; it seemed to lack any significance whatsoever, just a story of two eccentric characters.  There was little local color from its setting in Chicago and little of that time in the Nineties that set it apart.  The novel seemed to be saying that the late Clinton era was the final time in the United States when people could still afford to be artistic and offbeat and the last time it wasn’t dangerous to be different.

 However there is a certain appeal to this freaky romantic story that kept me listening.  This novel has no overwhelming message, no life changing or affirming theme or plot.  But if you as the reader just stay in the here and now and listen to these two quirky young people interact, you probably will be charmed like I was.  “Office Girl” reminded me that the ultimate destination is not that important; it is the small pleasures along the way.  The novel is also illustrated with photographs and pencil drawings, a nice touch.    

 “Office Girl” will not make my ‘Best of Year’ list, but it is an entertaining enough diversion, an enjoyable way to spend some time.  Not every novel has to be earth shattering or enervating.