Paper Pills

We’re All Reading the Same Books!

December 13, 2007 in book reviews, the literary conversation

It’s the end of the year, and “Best of 2007″ lists are as ubiquitous as the holiday sales that are currently depleting my bank account. Publishers Lunch has been keeping tabs of these lists and making increasingly sardonic remarks as the same 10 titles are highlighted again and again. The result is a fascinating analysis of homogeneous book reviewing. Because the piece is subscription only, I’m attaching the article here, behind this jump:

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This Week in Books

November 4, 2007 in book reviews, book thoughts

Another long delay, more apologies. Let’s move on.

Books I’ve Recently Read

This is the last book I finished, and the only one I’m interested in writing about. I found it a difficult read, but an intensely provocative one. After one read-through, I’m not entirely sure I understood everything that Llosa wove into his story. I tripped up over the untranslated Peruvian words, and I got lost in the unannounced transitions between narratives. This is not a book that you can read with only half a mind.

Let me begin the simplest way I know how: with a stab at a plot description. Corporal Lituma and his deputy Tomás have been sent to a village in the Peruvian mountains called Naccos to investigate a number of disappearances. Human disappearances. As Lituma and Tomás hole up in their bunks, wary of the cold and a roving band of revolutionaries/slaughterers, Tomás tells a story of a woman he loved and lost. Meanwhile, Llosa introduces us to the witch Dona Adriana and her husband, the village bartender, whose enigmatic tales circle and bring us closer to the reason behind the disappearances.

Meanwhile, this is a story of a country and a culture at war with itself. As new politics and new beliefs from the cities (in the form of Lituma and Tomás) attempt to establish control over the more remote villages, we witness the old traditions struggling to survive. Death in the Andes chronicles the failure of applying old solutions to new problems—a failure we witness worldwide as globalization places old cultures in unfamiliar new territory. This clash of civilizations reaches deep into the heart of Peru: As one of the terrorists explains to a soon-to-be martyr, “This is war, nobody can say it’s not their business. It’s everybody’s business, even mutes and deaf people and half wits.”

And this is also a story of an inherited culture of violence. The history of Peru is written in blood. As new waves of knowledge and politics and custom sweep in from the coast inland, history repeats itself. One of Naccos’ engineers muses, “I wonder…if what’s going on in Peru isn’t a resurrection of all that buried violence. As if it had been hidden somewhere, and suddenly, for some reason, it all surfaced again.”

In the end, the story is pretty chilling. Even though Tomás’ love story has a touch of Marquez, I was correct in my original assessment: this is magical realism of a different sort. Here magic and realism do not embrace each other in a beautiful, transcendent sort of way. Here magic and realism are at war. Magic warps reality, and reality debases magic. And this is the so-called “panoramic view of contemporary Peru” that the book’s back cover promises.

Books I’m Currently Reading

I’m reading this for a post I’m eventually going to make on Conversational Reading (a fantastic book blog, one of my favorite). It’s such a treat to go back to Pullman’s trilogy—the first time through, I realized that I had stumbled onto something far more profound than I had bargained for. Sure, you’ve got your witches and talking bears, but you’ve also got your particle physics and sharp criticisms of organized religion. In light of The Golden Compass coming out in theaters this December, I’m eager to see how Hollywood adapts this sprawling, magnificent tale.

Another collection of essays from Updike! This guy’s so prolific that his latest tomes encite more groans than anticipation, which is too bad, considering that Updike is probably one of our country’s most incisive critics and public intellectuals. I look forward to dipping into these essays in order to find out more about him.

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This Week in Books

September 29, 2007 in book reviews, comics

It’s been a while! But I had a flimsy reason: I wanted to post about 4 books I hadn’t written about before, as my lasting impressions on the Pamuk essay collection were more or less addressed in my last update. So now! 2 new books that I’ve just finished and two books I’m reading right now!

Books I’ve Recently Read

Silk is the sort of novella-cum-folk tale which you’d be doing yourself a great disservice to not read in one sitting. It’s difficult for me to explain the appeal of novels like these (The Piano Tuner, The Painted Veil—although, to be honest, I thought the latter was quite silly) with their 19th–century white guys voyaging into the interior of the Orient and meeting a mysterious women. The whole plot smacks of the kind of fetishistic orientalism that I hate. Why do books like this continue to be written well-into the 21st–century? These novels are not a part of the new trend towards global fiction; rather, they feel like a nostalgic throwback to when unexplored territories still existed, when the Other truly felt like an Other. I feel somewhat uneasy about what this nostalgia implies—some kind of frustration with multiculturalism? A yearning for the colonial?

But sinister overtures aside, Silk is an enthralling novella. With an tightly-wound economy that borders on poetry, Baricco distills the intensity and intoxication of a passion and obsession that transcends words. Images like the one of birds bursting from an aviary (a symbol of infidelity) have seared themselves onto my memory.

This was a book of mistaken identities. The winsome jacket image of two children gamboling on the beach made me assume that Ammaniti’s follow-up to the celebrated I’m Not Scared was going to be another bildungsroman like the first. But after the first 50 pages, I thought I had it all wrong: we read of the middle-aged exploits of Graziano Biglia, a washed-up classical guitar star who spends his days boozing and cruising while tossing bits of new age philosophy at us like offal. Oh, this isn’t about kids at all! I thought. And then the next 300 pages proved me wrong again: I’ll Steal You Away (for some reason, the jacket above says the novel is called Steal You Away. It’s not) is the captivating and endearing tale of Ischiano Scalo’s small-town residents, a kind of comic-tragic Winesburg, Ohio. All of the characters in this novel demand your empathy: Pietro, the lightweight 12-year-old who finds himself bullied into joining a bunch of asshole kids in vandalizing their school (our George Willard). Flora, the beautiful spinster schoolteacher (our Kate Swift) who finds herself seduced by Graziano, the aforementioned mess of a midlife crises. Once you start in on their troubles, their small victories, and their life-destroying defeats, the book is impossible to put down. And because this is Ammaniti, you can be sure that the children encounter something so disfiguring, yet so heartbreakingly human, that they can’t help but be thrust into adulthood. And meanwhile, the adults in their rural towns are not immune to the influx of cosmopolitan corruption (here in the form of “the most fuckable woman on the planet”). The result is a novel that is even more beautiful, picaresque, and haunting than I’m Not Scared.

Books I’m Currently Reading

This is Art Spiegelman, so I guess I should not be as surprised as I am that In the Shadow of No Towers is replete with paranoid ravings—even by the justified, lived-through-it-all standards of New Yorkers. In part, these ravings are intentional, a way of exhibiting the unraveling trust we place in our surroundings and our government’s ability (or desire) to protect us from harm. Additionally, Spiegelman’s response can almost seem justified, as he makes the connection to the panic felt during the Holocaust. But all in all, I’m finding it pretty hard to relate to No Towers‘s hysteria.

On the other hand, comic fans will get a huge kick out of Spiegelman’s incorporation of comics classics: Nemo, Popeye, Ignatz and Krazy Kat all make an appearance, both in the explanatory notes and examples provided at the end of the book and in the collages he incorporates into his story (Keep an eye out for “The Upside-Downs of Little Lady Lovekins and the Old Man Muffaroo,” with 12 captions over 6 panels, the final 6 panels being the first panels turned upside down—you rarely see this kind of technical skill anymore). I wonder what Spiegelman intended by incorporating the iconography of well-known classic comics into his bizarre narrative…Is he trying to escape the historical present or subvert the historical past?

I’m only 30 or so pages in, but this is shaping up to be an interesting read. Whereas Gabriel Garcia Marquez uses magical realism to spin transcendentally beautiful tales, Mario Vargas Llosa taps into a darker margic to tell a detective story that reeks of corruption and desperation. Say goodbye to Macondo, where butterflies herald the newly dead, and everyone’s having magical sex with everyone else. This is Peru, where bad shit happens.

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NYTBR review of Oates’s latest

June 27, 2007 in book reviews

From Lee Siegel’s review of The Gravedigger’s Daughter by Joyce Carol
Oates:

“Oates’s fiction courses around the twin poles of our national existence: hybridity and fluidity. That makes her the most American of writers. But being quintessentially American also makes Oates vulnerable to a particular pitfall of American velocity–getting too excited about everything that happens.”

It’s interesting and funny that Siegel defines the American existence in this manner: first couched in the terms of the “postmodern condition” of hybridity and fluidity (we are many things at once and cannot be pinned down) and then in this hysterical realist tradition of so many of our young authors (Eggers, Chabon, Foer, Smith). Not only are we indefinable, we are just SO! EXCITED! TO BE! ALIVE! I don’t know that this necessarily defines much of America, just the younger intellegentsia. In my opinion, much of America is both easily definable and weary with the lassitude of sameness.

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Reviews v. Criticism

June 26, 2007 in book reviews

The Reading Experience brought to my attention an interesting intra-book blog discussion on the differences between reviewing books and writing literary criticism, regarding Michiko Kakutani’s Pulitzer in Criticism (won in 1998, but especially relevant in light of all the indignant brouhaha book reviewers are raising against diminishing book review space). According to TRE, book reviewers (and the reading public) mistakenly conflate book reviews with criticism. In truth, book reviewers and literary critics serve vastly disparate purposes: the book reviewer provides a plot summary and judgment on a book, whereas the literary critic explores in greater depth a particular facet of a book. True, someone like Michiko Kakutani often uses the book review platform to leap into a discussion of a book’s larger themes or implications, but in the end, the book review passes judgment where the criticism does not.

Any English major can tell you that in writing about a book, judgment ought not to be a consideration. After all, we read what our professors tell us to read, and we write on those books whether we liked them or not. One’s personal preferences with regard to a book do not (or at least, should not) influence one’s ability to parse the text. In college, I wrote an entire thesis on 3 books, 2 of which I didn’t particularly care for. That didn’t stop me from talking about them for 90 pages. One’s taste in books is irrelevant to literary criticism.

In TRE’s eloquent and concise words:

“The essential task of criticism is not to evaluate fiction. It is an essential task of reviewing, but criticism can take place entirely outside the context of judgment and evaluation, or at least it can take place in a context that assumes evaluation and judgment have already taken place.”

I suppose this is why I find book reviews so difficult to write: for so long, I had trained myself to ignore what I think about a book in lieu of what I think a book is saying. Now that I’d like to write some book reviews, I find myself wincing at my opinions, wanting to cross them out in favor of lengthy analysis–exactly what readers of book reviews don’t want to read! I spend a good portion of my job reading book reviews so that I can pull together quote sheets for advertisements. In doing so, I’ve gotten a pretty good handle on what makes a good book review. Surprisingly, a good book review is not a lengthy article that delves into the history of the subject, the biography of the viewer, and the larger implications of the book’s publication (I’m looking at you, New Yorker!), but is more often a concise description of the subject (one that whets more than satiates one’s curiosity) with a very clear opinion on the book (thanks, Economist). That’s not to say that the New Yorker book reviews aren’t a pleasure to read–they can be quite profound–it’s just that they’re not particularly utilitarian book reviews. There have been several occasions when I’ve put down a New Yorker book review and thought, “Wait, so should I read this book or not?”

I hope TRE’s post isn’t the last I hear of the reviews v. criticism debate. Because I have a vested interest in book reviews, I’ll be sure to write up more posts on the Book Review as Writing Form.

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