The result of the jury in the 2011 Man Booker Prize will be announced next Tuesday 18 October and I have been slow to keep up to date with the short list. As always, the list is controversial and omits some biggies - though I must agree with the decision to drop Hollinghurst and Barry, neither of whose books represent their best. The full list for anyone who missed it is: Sense of an Ending [Julian Barnes], The Sisters Brothers [De Witt], Halfs Blood Blues [Edugyan], Jamrach's Menagerie [Carol Birch], Pigeon English [Kelman] and Snowdrops [Miller]. I have already reviewed at length Sense of an Ending which, if there is any justice out there, should win - but then I have never guessed accurately the winner of the Booker!
If there should be a different book chosen, I could not argue about The Sisters Brothers. This is a book to give one pause and reverse many long held opinions. This is a Western! And I have to say that I was as far outside my comfort zone as I could be when I started reading it. Patrick deWitt is a Canadian, born in British Columbia, though now living in Oregon. This is his second novel and it is set in Oregon and California in 1851 around the time of the gold rush in the Sierra Nevada and the Coen Brothers must surely film it! I have to say that I never imagined I would find myself rooting for two psychopaths - but I did!
The two psychopaths are Eli and Charlie Sisters, hired killers, who are on a job taking them from Oregon to California and the book is, on the one hand, the story of that odyssey, the characters they meet on route and the events that occur, all told in a dead-pan, in-your-face manner, at times weirdly humorous; and, on the other, it is an almost spiritual odyssey for the younger brother, Eli, who is considering quitting his 'career' to open a trading post. The brothers' reputation precedes them and at every stop they only have to mention their names to secure instant fear and respect. Inevitably, they are challenged from time to time but always at the cost to the challenger. The story is narrated by Eli and, consequently, we are party to his laboured arguments with himself and his relationship with his brother. He is greatly attached to his horse and takes utmost pains to look after him in contrast to his easy acceptance of the deaths of various men en route. Indeed, the wonders of a tooth brush and tooth powder to which he is introduced by one character, a dentist, is more noteworthy than the deaths of four men who refused to loan Charlie their axe.
The 'job' takes an unexpected turn - enough of a spoiler! deWitt's writing is lucid and flowing. He eschews any descriptions of the landscape through which the brothers pass in favour of character development which is gripping. His language is particular and the dialogue appropriate to the period but beautifully phrased. At one point, a whore with whom Charlie has spent the night remarks to Eli, 'you got all the romantic blood, is that it?' to which Eli replies, 'our blood is the same, we just use it differently' which neatly encapsulates the gradually widening fissure between the brothers.
If you think Westerns finished with the Coen Brothers True Grit, think again! Just read it and see!
On the other hand, if you never get to read Jamrach's Menagerie by Carol Birch don't worry. It is neither as magical or 'completely original' as A.S. Byatt maintains on the jacket cover. As a blurb on the back says, this is Dickens meets Moby Dick but I think if you want either, then read a Dickens novel or Moby Dick. The book was also longlisted for the Orange Prize so is clearly highly considered by some. I found the narrative uneven, at times tedious, and the conclusion disappointing if obvious. In its favour, I was relieved that Ms Birch did not try to emulate cockney slang or any dialect in her writing sticking to plain English with no anachronisms.
Without wanting to spoil the story, should you read it, there is one particularly interesting and well described section but at the same time, it has been done equally well elsewhere and is not original. The narrative is told by a Jaffy Brown, a cockney, who goes to sea as a teenager on a whaling ship with an extra purpose, that of capturing and bringing back a 'dragon' as they term an extremely large member of the lizard family, for Jaffy's employer, a certain Mr Jamrach who deals in exotic animals. His best friend, Tim accompanies him and the narrative describes their life on board which has none of the usual hardships associated with sailing in Victorian times in that they have a kind captain and friendly crew. The events at sea form the core of the story.
A tour de force this is not.
Half Blood Blues by another Canadian, Esi Edugyan, is a better read altogether. I have to admit the jacket and story blurb at the back of it put me off initially but I am glad I persisted despite them. Edugyan is a product of John Hopkins Writing Seminars from which she has a Masters in Writing and, I would guess, some expertise in jazz and music groups. Or else, she did some very good research.
The narrative concerns a jazz group formed in Berlin in the thirties three of whom escape to France but get trapped again there with the fall of Paris in 1940. The story is told by one of the group, Sid Griffiths, and deals primarily with him, his friend Chip Jones and the star of the group, a young black German, Hieronymous Falk. It moves between the events of that time and the early nineties when Chip and Sid return to Berlin and Poland following receipt of a mysterious letter that seems to indicate that Hiero is still alive.
Though I am often a little wary of the products of creative writing courses, this is a beautifully written novel with just the right element of suspense. The music scenes are well described with great veracity including the trials and heartache of cutting a record in the forties and Edugyan appears to have a genuine feel for the rhythms of jazz which percolate the novel. The intonations and language of her characters are perfect and she captures the atmosphere of Paris during the 'phony war' with great delicacy and skill. Definitely worth a read.
Pigeon English by Stephen Kelman still awaits me. Snowdrops by AD Miller does not appeal. Though well written as one might expect by a long time contributor to The Economist, the story falls short of what might be expected on the Booker List. It is a crime story set in Putin's Russia with elements of Bond and, as the Guardian review said, 'standard issue characters' in a Russia that one can happily think the worst of. Not my cup of tea!
Wednesday, October 12, 2011
Thursday, September 15, 2011
The Sense of an Ending [Julian Barnes]
This has to be one of the saddest books I have ever read, It is an attack on the smugness of youth and the complacency of old age. It is a warning that our early actions can come back to haunt us. Cliches are after all founded on truth.
It is the story of a man, Tony Webster, who is comfortably retired, amicably divorced with one safely married daughter, who takes pleasure in history and music, keeping his apartment well maintained and volunteering in the local hospital library once a week. His only close friend appears to be his divorced wife but he seems perfectly content with this. Though he admits to moments of self-pity, he thinks that 'we end up all belonging to the same category, that of the non-young' and claims 'I've never much minded this myself'. He says that 'I rarely ended up fantasising a markedly different life from the one that has been mine'. He is not odd enough not to have done the things he ended up doing with his life and he neither looks back or obsesses about death. Though Barnes has written on death, this novel is not about death though three deaths occur and it is the third of these that leads to a cataclysmic result for Tony.
The novel is divided into two parts. In the first part, Webster is a callow sixth-former, one of a trio who draw into their clique a new-comer, the intellectual and clever Adrian Finn. They were - as Tony at age 65 remembers - 'book-hungry, sex-hungry, meritocratic, anarchistic. All political and social systems appeared to us corrupt, yet we declined to consider an alternative other than hedonistic chaos'. In other words, they were the pretentious children of the sixties with a fear that life wouldn't turn out to be like literature and, as Barnes writes, 'most people didn't experience the Sixties until the Seventies'. The group splits up when school ends and they go their separate ways, Tony to university in Bristol and Adrian to Cambridge. At Bristol, Tony gets into a relationship, fraught at times, with Veronica Ford, a wayward and opinionated young woman. When Tony takes her to London to meet with his friends, Veronica is clearly taken with Adrian who is fulfilling his early promise successfully in Cambridge. Tony's relationship with Veronica does not last his time in Bristol but its effects and reverberations are to impinge greatly on his life.
In the second part, Webster is now 65 and retired when an extraordinary event catapults Veronica back into his life. He receives a lawyer's letter regarding a small bequest which becomes the source of agonizing memory searches and a re-evaluation of his entire life.
It is hard to believe that this small book is only 150 pages long so replete is it with ideas, philosophy and subtle - and not so subtle - aphorisms. Barnes has excelled himself with this one. One critic has compared it with Chesil Beach where the backgrounds and characters are not dissimilar but perhaps it would be truer to say that this is the book that McEwan would like to have written. The main character, Tony Webster, is beautifully drawn. Barnes develops Tony's character with deftness so we are remarkedly at ease with the accumulation of events in his life and his thought processes. Though this book, as I said, is not about death but about life, I can't do better than quote John Self who said, in his review of the book, 'Death, getting close every day, is always personal. In Frank Kermode’s work of literary criticism from which Barnes takes his title, “the sense of an ending” refers to apocalypticism, the end of the world. Barnes’s concern here is far more serious than that'.
It is the story of a man, Tony Webster, who is comfortably retired, amicably divorced with one safely married daughter, who takes pleasure in history and music, keeping his apartment well maintained and volunteering in the local hospital library once a week. His only close friend appears to be his divorced wife but he seems perfectly content with this. Though he admits to moments of self-pity, he thinks that 'we end up all belonging to the same category, that of the non-young' and claims 'I've never much minded this myself'. He says that 'I rarely ended up fantasising a markedly different life from the one that has been mine'. He is not odd enough not to have done the things he ended up doing with his life and he neither looks back or obsesses about death. Though Barnes has written on death, this novel is not about death though three deaths occur and it is the third of these that leads to a cataclysmic result for Tony.
The novel is divided into two parts. In the first part, Webster is a callow sixth-former, one of a trio who draw into their clique a new-comer, the intellectual and clever Adrian Finn. They were - as Tony at age 65 remembers - 'book-hungry, sex-hungry, meritocratic, anarchistic. All political and social systems appeared to us corrupt, yet we declined to consider an alternative other than hedonistic chaos'. In other words, they were the pretentious children of the sixties with a fear that life wouldn't turn out to be like literature and, as Barnes writes, 'most people didn't experience the Sixties until the Seventies'. The group splits up when school ends and they go their separate ways, Tony to university in Bristol and Adrian to Cambridge. At Bristol, Tony gets into a relationship, fraught at times, with Veronica Ford, a wayward and opinionated young woman. When Tony takes her to London to meet with his friends, Veronica is clearly taken with Adrian who is fulfilling his early promise successfully in Cambridge. Tony's relationship with Veronica does not last his time in Bristol but its effects and reverberations are to impinge greatly on his life.
In the second part, Webster is now 65 and retired when an extraordinary event catapults Veronica back into his life. He receives a lawyer's letter regarding a small bequest which becomes the source of agonizing memory searches and a re-evaluation of his entire life.
It is hard to believe that this small book is only 150 pages long so replete is it with ideas, philosophy and subtle - and not so subtle - aphorisms. Barnes has excelled himself with this one. One critic has compared it with Chesil Beach where the backgrounds and characters are not dissimilar but perhaps it would be truer to say that this is the book that McEwan would like to have written. The main character, Tony Webster, is beautifully drawn. Barnes develops Tony's character with deftness so we are remarkedly at ease with the accumulation of events in his life and his thought processes. Though this book, as I said, is not about death but about life, I can't do better than quote John Self who said, in his review of the book, 'Death, getting close every day, is always personal. In Frank Kermode’s work of literary criticism from which Barnes takes his title, “the sense of an ending” refers to apocalypticism, the end of the world. Barnes’s concern here is far more serious than that'.
Tuesday, August 30, 2011
Guardian Review of 'C'
Alfred Hickling is rapidly turning into my personal bete noir for his pocket reviews of books he apparently has not fully read. Last Saturday [Review, Saturday Guardian 27.08.11] he did an inaccurate thumbnail sketch of C by Tom McCarthy which did little justice to this powerful novel, probably the best published in the UK in 2010. This is a book which has been described as an historical novel but it is concerned less with history than with ideas and minds. It is full of philosophic allusions and learned references that sit comfortably in what is at times a highly amusing book and most readable.
The protagonist, Serge Carrefax, does not wind up in Egypt installing transmitters [as AH says] but is asked to come to Alexandria to write a report or reports on the advancement of a company alluded to as the Empire Wireless Chain. His 'aerial adventures' [to quote Hickling] give one of the best descriptions I have ever read of flying as an observer over the front lines in the First World War in France [not Egypt, AH]. And the cocaine he uses on his eyeballs is to sharpen his vision, not to get high [AH] - vision being a deep theme of the book. Serge is at once both in and not in the world; not so much suffering any existential angst but rather with a phenomenological grasp of life around him. Studying art with his tutor as a boy, he experienced great difficulty with perspective viewing the world as flat, an image that is reinforced as an observer flying with the RFC in the war.
These thumbnail reviews of newly published paperbacks are a useful aid to books one might have missed when published in hardback. It does us no service to misconstrue them.
The protagonist, Serge Carrefax, does not wind up in Egypt installing transmitters [as AH says] but is asked to come to Alexandria to write a report or reports on the advancement of a company alluded to as the Empire Wireless Chain. His 'aerial adventures' [to quote Hickling] give one of the best descriptions I have ever read of flying as an observer over the front lines in the First World War in France [not Egypt, AH]. And the cocaine he uses on his eyeballs is to sharpen his vision, not to get high [AH] - vision being a deep theme of the book. Serge is at once both in and not in the world; not so much suffering any existential angst but rather with a phenomenological grasp of life around him. Studying art with his tutor as a boy, he experienced great difficulty with perspective viewing the world as flat, an image that is reinforced as an observer flying with the RFC in the war.
These thumbnail reviews of newly published paperbacks are a useful aid to books one might have missed when published in hardback. It does us no service to misconstrue them.
Friday, August 12, 2011
New Finnish Grammar
Last week the Guardian lamented the malaise in 21st century [English] publishing but there is hope as long as they continue to buy and translate the gems being published on the European mainland. One such is the New Finnish Grammar by Diego Marani, first published in Italy in 2000 and now available in English thanks to Dedalus Books. Nicholas Lezard commented that he couldn't 'remember when I read a more extraordinary novel, or when I was last so strongly tempted to use the word "genius" of its author'. Perhaps 'genius' is rather strong as he leaves many questions unanswered in the text but nevertheless, as Josipovici said of it, 'what he has produced is still a cut above what passes for serious fiction in this country'.
The story is deceptively simple and straightforward which will reassure those who tire of the time leaps and split narratives of the postmoderns! A severely wounded unidentified sailor is found in Trieste in 1943 and taken on to a German hospital ship where he comes under the care of a Dr Friari. When the wounded man awakes from his coma, he has no memory, no knowledge of either where he comes from or who he is but most profoundly, he has no language. As he himself says, 'All linguistic feeling, all interest in words, had died away'. Dr Friari, himself an exile from Finland since childhood, assumes the man is Finnish as the label sewn on his jacket has the name Sampo Karjalainen, a Finnish name. The doctor determines to get Sampo well enough to return to Finland and, in the meantime, starts to teach him Finnish which he assumes to be his mother tongue. He could hardly have started on a more difficult course as Finnish has to be Europe's most complicated language where even the nouns have multiple declensions.
Sampo does get to Helsinki where his recovery continues and language skills grow apace under the guidance of an extraordinary pastor, the military chaplain, Olof Koskela. an ebullient, extrovert giant of a man, steeped in Finnish folklore and fond of a daily tincture of koskenkorva. He also attempts a relationship with a nurse, Ilma. He realises quickly enough that to rediscover his true past is an impossibility and that Dr Friari was right - 'language is our mother, and it is through language that we come into this world'. The account of his time in the military installation in Helsinki is fascinating and Marani maintains the suspense and keeps us avid to learn his identity to the very end.
This is a story about war and love and memory and particularly about language - not surprising as the author, Marani, is a linguist in the EU. There are thorny questions that Marani dodges as he ignores the Ghost in the Machine. Sampo discovers at an early stage that he recognises objects and what they are for - he has therefore retained the concept of 'knowing how' but not the one of 'knowing that'. He also acknowledges early on that without language there is no memory but nevertheless he says on the second page that 'even in my confusion I remembered that there was a war on ... my thoughts seemed to well up out of nothingness and then sink down again into the porous soil of my unfocused consciousness'. Thoughts? Was he picturing to himself in auditory or visual images? Thinking is normally interpreted as an operation with symbols such as words and sentences but Marani does not go there. [For any reader interested in this aspect, Gilbert Ryle has written a very original text on the subject called The Concept of Mind]. The story is told by both Dr Friari and Sampo and Sampo's language in writing gets rather sophisticated at a stage when he apparently can barely make himself understood to others. However, none of these thought-provoking questions in anyway detract from Marani's exquisite piece of work.
I agree with Lezard that this is definitely an extraordinary book.
The story is deceptively simple and straightforward which will reassure those who tire of the time leaps and split narratives of the postmoderns! A severely wounded unidentified sailor is found in Trieste in 1943 and taken on to a German hospital ship where he comes under the care of a Dr Friari. When the wounded man awakes from his coma, he has no memory, no knowledge of either where he comes from or who he is but most profoundly, he has no language. As he himself says, 'All linguistic feeling, all interest in words, had died away'. Dr Friari, himself an exile from Finland since childhood, assumes the man is Finnish as the label sewn on his jacket has the name Sampo Karjalainen, a Finnish name. The doctor determines to get Sampo well enough to return to Finland and, in the meantime, starts to teach him Finnish which he assumes to be his mother tongue. He could hardly have started on a more difficult course as Finnish has to be Europe's most complicated language where even the nouns have multiple declensions.
Sampo does get to Helsinki where his recovery continues and language skills grow apace under the guidance of an extraordinary pastor, the military chaplain, Olof Koskela. an ebullient, extrovert giant of a man, steeped in Finnish folklore and fond of a daily tincture of koskenkorva. He also attempts a relationship with a nurse, Ilma. He realises quickly enough that to rediscover his true past is an impossibility and that Dr Friari was right - 'language is our mother, and it is through language that we come into this world'. The account of his time in the military installation in Helsinki is fascinating and Marani maintains the suspense and keeps us avid to learn his identity to the very end.
This is a story about war and love and memory and particularly about language - not surprising as the author, Marani, is a linguist in the EU. There are thorny questions that Marani dodges as he ignores the Ghost in the Machine. Sampo discovers at an early stage that he recognises objects and what they are for - he has therefore retained the concept of 'knowing how' but not the one of 'knowing that'. He also acknowledges early on that without language there is no memory but nevertheless he says on the second page that 'even in my confusion I remembered that there was a war on ... my thoughts seemed to well up out of nothingness and then sink down again into the porous soil of my unfocused consciousness'. Thoughts? Was he picturing to himself in auditory or visual images? Thinking is normally interpreted as an operation with symbols such as words and sentences but Marani does not go there. [For any reader interested in this aspect, Gilbert Ryle has written a very original text on the subject called The Concept of Mind]. The story is told by both Dr Friari and Sampo and Sampo's language in writing gets rather sophisticated at a stage when he apparently can barely make himself understood to others. However, none of these thought-provoking questions in anyway detract from Marani's exquisite piece of work.
I agree with Lezard that this is definitely an extraordinary book.
Thursday, August 11, 2011
Pereira Maintains
One could be forgiven for thinking that Alfred Hickling, Guardian reviewer, fails to read at least some of the books he reviews. At best this is irritating but at worst it misleads potential readers so they miss out on some veritable masterpieces such as Pereira Maintains by Antonio Tabucchi [reviewed by Hickling in the Guardian Review, Saturday 6 August]. Tabucchi is a major Italian author whose book, published originally in Italian in 1994, sold 300,000 copies and was then picked up by Canongate Books, translated by Patrick Creagh and published in 2010 in Britain. It deserves better than Hickling's faulty summary.
The book is listed as a political thriller and it is, to a certain extent this, but it is more. It is set in 1938 Lisbon, six years after Salazar got into power and established a repressive, Catholic, fascistic dictatorship. Salazar was an admirer of Hitler and supporter of the Franco, anti-republican side in the Spanish Civil War. Dr Pereira, the eponymous hero, is an overweight, lonely man, a recent widower who talks to his dead wife's portrait and who eats vast quantities of omelettes aux fine herbes and drinks highly sugared lemonade. He is employed as editor of the literary pages of a low circulation Lisbon paper, the Lisboa. Censorship is of course rife and, though Pereira deplores it, he is also himself guilty of self censorship, rarely pushing the envelope, contenting himself with publishing translations of 19th century French novels. The closest he comes to rebelling at censorship is publishing the translation of a story by Daudet which includes the phrase 'vive la France' which brings down the wrath of the government and editor on him, Portugal being firmly opposed to France.
This changes however when he comes in contact with a young man, Monteiro Rossi, a university graduate with a first in Philosophy, who draws himself to Pereira's attention with an article on death and the soul which subject obsesses Pereira. He takes on Rossi to write obituaries for the files, all of which prove totally unpublishable but he continues to pay him even when he discovers Rossi is in fact a revolutionary organising volunteers and raising funds for the anti Franco International Brigade. The change is not sudden but rather is the theme of the book culminating in a catastrophe which does change Pereira's life for ever evincing a courage and commitment only hinted at to that point.
Tabucchi is a stylist in the postmodern tradition who writes with great thought if though somewhat at times enigmatic. The title is not lightly chosen as it is written in the third person in what is described as a testimonial style. The phrase 'Pereira maintains' is used continually giving the impression that one is reading a report drawn up by an interrogator - whether fascist or revolutionary we don't know. I like to think he is in the hands of the revolutionaries as, at one point, Rossi's girlfriend tells Pereira what a help he is being saying 'we of the cause will not forget it'. The book is littered with references to various authors - Rilke, Mann, Daudet, Marx, Pessoa and so on - none of whom are lightly chosen. Equally the characters Pereira meets or associates with are at times almost surreal, from the German Jewish lady with a wooden leg to the local priest, Fr Antonio, who is firmly opposed to Franco and, particularly, the waiter in his favourite cafe who supplies him with the international news on a daily basis. One day, the waiter, Manuel, in a rather perplexed tone, tells Periera that Portugal was mentioned on the news for the first time and that it was described as a dictatorship. He was genuinely upset to learn that he was living under a dictator!
Pereira Maintains has been made into a film though sadly it is only available in Italian with no subtitles. It clearly is highly regarded in Italy as representing almost a pastiche of how things were at the time of its writing just following the election of Berlusconi. Personlly I think it stands as a stark warning against the encroachment of the far right parties now growing in influence everywhere.
The book is listed as a political thriller and it is, to a certain extent this, but it is more. It is set in 1938 Lisbon, six years after Salazar got into power and established a repressive, Catholic, fascistic dictatorship. Salazar was an admirer of Hitler and supporter of the Franco, anti-republican side in the Spanish Civil War. Dr Pereira, the eponymous hero, is an overweight, lonely man, a recent widower who talks to his dead wife's portrait and who eats vast quantities of omelettes aux fine herbes and drinks highly sugared lemonade. He is employed as editor of the literary pages of a low circulation Lisbon paper, the Lisboa. Censorship is of course rife and, though Pereira deplores it, he is also himself guilty of self censorship, rarely pushing the envelope, contenting himself with publishing translations of 19th century French novels. The closest he comes to rebelling at censorship is publishing the translation of a story by Daudet which includes the phrase 'vive la France' which brings down the wrath of the government and editor on him, Portugal being firmly opposed to France.
This changes however when he comes in contact with a young man, Monteiro Rossi, a university graduate with a first in Philosophy, who draws himself to Pereira's attention with an article on death and the soul which subject obsesses Pereira. He takes on Rossi to write obituaries for the files, all of which prove totally unpublishable but he continues to pay him even when he discovers Rossi is in fact a revolutionary organising volunteers and raising funds for the anti Franco International Brigade. The change is not sudden but rather is the theme of the book culminating in a catastrophe which does change Pereira's life for ever evincing a courage and commitment only hinted at to that point.
Tabucchi is a stylist in the postmodern tradition who writes with great thought if though somewhat at times enigmatic. The title is not lightly chosen as it is written in the third person in what is described as a testimonial style. The phrase 'Pereira maintains' is used continually giving the impression that one is reading a report drawn up by an interrogator - whether fascist or revolutionary we don't know. I like to think he is in the hands of the revolutionaries as, at one point, Rossi's girlfriend tells Pereira what a help he is being saying 'we of the cause will not forget it'. The book is littered with references to various authors - Rilke, Mann, Daudet, Marx, Pessoa and so on - none of whom are lightly chosen. Equally the characters Pereira meets or associates with are at times almost surreal, from the German Jewish lady with a wooden leg to the local priest, Fr Antonio, who is firmly opposed to Franco and, particularly, the waiter in his favourite cafe who supplies him with the international news on a daily basis. One day, the waiter, Manuel, in a rather perplexed tone, tells Periera that Portugal was mentioned on the news for the first time and that it was described as a dictatorship. He was genuinely upset to learn that he was living under a dictator!
Pereira Maintains has been made into a film though sadly it is only available in Italian with no subtitles. It clearly is highly regarded in Italy as representing almost a pastiche of how things were at the time of its writing just following the election of Berlusconi. Personlly I think it stands as a stark warning against the encroachment of the far right parties now growing in influence everywhere.
Wednesday, July 6, 2011
Jennifer Egan and 'A Visit from the Goon Squad'
You may have been noticing Jennifer Egan's name suddenly popping up in all sorts of places and not without reason. She has won the prestigious National Book Critics Award and Pulitzer Prize for her latest novel A Visit from the Goon Squad.
This is a most exciting novel - though it is not a novel as we know it. The author claims she was influenced by Proust and The Sopranos - a curious combination - in its writing. Certainly it is underpinned by conceptions of time and space. It is not a novel in that it does not conform to the usual narrative structure. The characters move backwards and forwards through time with large gaps in their development in a frequently dystopian world centred on the music industry in the States in the 70's through to future time. Egan is not shy of experimenting using different typefaces; narrative in the first and third person - and, even in one chapter, in the second; long footnotes in one section, text-speak and, most interesting, a complete chapter done as a PowerPoint presentation. This latter startles initially. It is written by the sister of a seemingly autistic young man who is obsessed by the length and occurrence of gaps in rocksongs and the nature of PowerPoint reproduces this thereby reinforcing Egan's conception of time and space. What seems to be a gimmick actually is a strong element of the novel.
The book concerns a disparate group of characters who interact spasmodically, sometimes with the main character, sometimes with their own stories and sometimes in a 'chain'. Memory is important and, at times, she leaps forward in order to go back. The cast is big and, at times, it can be difficult to remember who did what to whom. Basically, it concerns one, Bennie Salazar, who, with a group of friends in the 70's, starts a second rate punk band called The Flaming Dildos and then, in time, sets up his own record label and becomes a music producer. He employs Sasha as his assistant who has lead and goes on to lead a hugely varied life. Her significance is not only that it is her daughter that writes the PowerPoint chapter but Egan introduces her in the very first lines of the book and she is the last character referred to in the end. In other words she bookends the narrative creating a cycle within which the rest of the cast act and interact. In the course of the book, we meet the varied members of this cast whose lives connect and disconnect with Bennie and Sasha and none of whom are dull.
This is an important book and unique. It is not postmodern but rather post postmodern and the chances Egan takes pay off. It is fun to read and she brings both irony and romance to it. What appears to be unstructured and chaotic in fact reflects life as we do know it - even if few of us actually get to live at quite the pace of most of her creations. By the end of it, you can nod your head and agree, yes, there is both Proust and The Sopranos there.
U shld by it!
This is a most exciting novel - though it is not a novel as we know it. The author claims she was influenced by Proust and The Sopranos - a curious combination - in its writing. Certainly it is underpinned by conceptions of time and space. It is not a novel in that it does not conform to the usual narrative structure. The characters move backwards and forwards through time with large gaps in their development in a frequently dystopian world centred on the music industry in the States in the 70's through to future time. Egan is not shy of experimenting using different typefaces; narrative in the first and third person - and, even in one chapter, in the second; long footnotes in one section, text-speak and, most interesting, a complete chapter done as a PowerPoint presentation. This latter startles initially. It is written by the sister of a seemingly autistic young man who is obsessed by the length and occurrence of gaps in rocksongs and the nature of PowerPoint reproduces this thereby reinforcing Egan's conception of time and space. What seems to be a gimmick actually is a strong element of the novel.
The book concerns a disparate group of characters who interact spasmodically, sometimes with the main character, sometimes with their own stories and sometimes in a 'chain'. Memory is important and, at times, she leaps forward in order to go back. The cast is big and, at times, it can be difficult to remember who did what to whom. Basically, it concerns one, Bennie Salazar, who, with a group of friends in the 70's, starts a second rate punk band called The Flaming Dildos and then, in time, sets up his own record label and becomes a music producer. He employs Sasha as his assistant who has lead and goes on to lead a hugely varied life. Her significance is not only that it is her daughter that writes the PowerPoint chapter but Egan introduces her in the very first lines of the book and she is the last character referred to in the end. In other words she bookends the narrative creating a cycle within which the rest of the cast act and interact. In the course of the book, we meet the varied members of this cast whose lives connect and disconnect with Bennie and Sasha and none of whom are dull.
This is an important book and unique. It is not postmodern but rather post postmodern and the chances Egan takes pay off. It is fun to read and she brings both irony and romance to it. What appears to be unstructured and chaotic in fact reflects life as we do know it - even if few of us actually get to live at quite the pace of most of her creations. By the end of it, you can nod your head and agree, yes, there is both Proust and The Sopranos there.
U shld by it!
Red April
Sometimes the judges get it right! I was excited to read that the Independent Foreign Fiction prize was awarded to Santiago Roncagliolo which [to quote the Guardian] puts 'the 36-year old Peruvian author in a star-studded line-up of former winners, from Milan Kundera to WG Sebald'.
Readers of my blog may remember I posted a review of Red April last March and strongly recommended you read it!
Readers of my blog may remember I posted a review of Red April last March and strongly recommended you read it!
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