Watch This Space

Coming soon: Assessments of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun (remarkable and moving), Woody Allen's Mere Anarchy (his first collection in over 25 years), Roberto Bolano's The Savage Detectives (the most manic of the 'post-boom' Latin American writers) and Kalpana Swaminathan's The Gardener's Song (Lalli's back!).

Falling Down

A condensed version of a review that appeared in today's Hindustan Times.

FALLING MAN Don DeLillo

The sense of being let down by Falling Man is acute. This isn’t the incisive, poised DeLillo of the clairvoyant Mao II or the “super-omniscient” Underworld, but the novelist who’s also written the more recent and disappointing Cosmopolis and The Body Artist.

It begins promisingly enough, with the aftermath of the destruction of the first Twin Tower. A shell-shocked Keith Neudecker stumbles through the ravaged site and to the house of his estranged wife Lianne and son Justin, where he takes up residence. The couple attempts to regain balance in the days and years that follow: Keith embarks upon a brief affair, then finds succour in poker; Liane conducts workshops for the Alzheimer’s-stricken, tries to make sense of the relationship between her mother and her lover and watches the eponymous “falling man”, a performance artist. Inserted into this are interludes dealing with the pre-9/11 preparations of a suicide terrorist, Hammad, his hesitations and his holding onto his faith.

The neurosis of survivors; the battle against forgetting; the randomness of events; the creation of art out of tragedy -- all the elements are in place, but the whole is still unsatisfying. Barring some flashes and effective set pieces (such as the rituals of the poker players), the prose is stiff; in particular, the sections dealing with Hammad’s psyche are pedestrian. Overall, this is an alienating and constricted novel, almost a series of mechanistic fragments belonging to an unwritten larger work.

Worth your while? The best work on the subject still remains the US government’s 9/11 Commission Report.

Immigrant Song

TWO CARAVANS Marina Lewycka

In this follow-up to the charming A Short History of Tractors in Ukranian, Marina Lewycka takes the same theme – immigrants from the former USSR searching for a better life in the United Kingdom – to come up with a novel that tries to be technically superior, and is as droll as her debut.

It opens on an idyllic English countryside – only, this one is populated by strawberry-picking migrants. They’re from Poland, Ukraine, Africa and China, including the Dylan-loving Tomasz, the determined Andriy, the naïve Irina and the wide-eyed Emmanuel. After a fracas precipitated by a farmer’s wife, their lives become a series of farcical travails.

Lewycka details the occupations they’re forced into for less-than-minimum wages: chicken farming, waitressing and dishwashing, among others. (Warning: the section on chickens will put you off your next non-vegetarian meal.) Ultimately, the book becomes the love story of Andriy and Irina, taking a road trip to outwit thuggish employment agents. Pity: this narrowing of focus and dependence on coincidence is a let-down.

The prose is cheerful and twinkling -- though the patois of Emmanuel’s letters and the delineation of a dog’s consciousness get a trifle wearying. It’s the ironic, witty sensibility that keeps you engaged.

Worth your while? Yes: a good example of how unpleasant subjects don’t have to be written about in grim tones to engage the heart and mind.

9 To 5 To Eternity

THEN WE CAME TO THE END Joshua Ferris

Considering that most of us spend most of our time in cubicles, it’s surprising there aren’t more novels about office life. Which is among the reasons that Joshua Ferris’ debut novel is so welcome. (The title, by the way, is drawn from the first sentence of DeLillo’s Americana.)

Based in a Chicago ad agency that’s undergoing hard times, it shows how copywriters, art directors and account people spend their time gossiping, backbiting, reacting to layoffs, playing musical chairs and – occasionally – working. Told almost entirely in first person plural (also employed by Jeffrey Eugenides in The Virgin Suicides), it is irreverent, ironic, black-humoured and, surprisingly, touching. Ferris navigates the challenges of this point of view with aplomb, never letting it become too impersonal: will the ageing copywriter get over being laid-off, will the managing partner recover from cancer, will the couples stay together or part ways?

In many ways, Then We Came to the End is a cross between BBC’s The Office and Joseph Heller’s Something Happened, with sprinkings of Dilbert-like absurdity and Bartleby-like resignation. What’s original is Ferris’ satirical take on employees veering between camaraderie and ennui.

Worth your while? Yes, if you’ve ever looked around your workplace in the middle of a long day and wondered what on earth you were doing there.

Refreshing Rereading

READING LIFE: BOOKS FOR THE AGES Sven Birkerts

If I’ve been tardy about replenishing this blog of late, blame it on Sven Birkerts. In this new collection of essays, he waxes so eloquent about the experience of re-reading the books that have mattered to him that one has been compelled to start re-reading some of them oneself – having just finished Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift, one is about to embark on Ford’s The Good Soldier.

It’s typical of the Harvard professor and Agni editor to eschew academic posturing and jargon; instead, his essays deal with episodes from his life when he first read the books – teaching experiences, shifts of residence, childhood incidents, break-ups – and what he now feels upon re-reading them. (One of the essays, in fact, was earlier published in Anne Fadiman's delightful Rereadings.) Thus, we learn of his students’ reactions to Lolita, of his former girlfriend’s enthusiasm for Women in Love, of his finally managing to complete The Ambassadors on his fifth attempt and more: an account of the books that are his “personal signposts”.

His enthusiasm for literature and reading is infectious, and his conclusions and revelations are always interesting. Which makes this a most engaging collection. (Okay, enough adjectives.)

Worth your while? In his recent essay, The Curtain, Milan Kundera quotes Proust: “Every reader, as he reads, is actually the reader of himself. The writer’s work is only a kind of optical instrument he provides the reader so he can discern what he might never have seen in himself without this book. The reader’s recognition in himself of what the book says is the proof of the book’s truth”. If that’s your credo, this book’s for you.

The Witching Hour

AFTER DARK Haruki Murakami
Translated from the Japanese by Jay Rubin

Night-time in Tokyo. Jazz and pop standards play at seedy restaurants while a trombonist tries to befriend an insomniac teenager in a café, a former wrestler-turned-manager of a ‘love hotel’ called Alphaville deals with a bloody assault on one of the residents, and an American Psycho-type character recuperates after a dark deed. Hovering above all of these is the spectre of another young woman, in a coma in a room with a TV set that has mysterious powers of absorption.

This, then, is trademark Murakami, dealing with one surreal night in the lives of disaffected young Japanese searching for connection. (Along the way, he has fun with the conventions of third-person point-of-view, making it as much of a disinterested observer as the rest.) Murakami fans will find nothing to let them down here, although it must be said that his novels work best when stringing together a series of unsettling, unfathomable images – without relying too much on dialogue that descends into the banal, which is the case with After Dark.

Worth your while? If you’ve read and liked Murakami before, go ahead; if not, you’d be better off with some of his earlier works such as Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World or The Wind-up Bird Chronicle.

Hunt And Peck

RISKY BUSINESS Al Alvarez

Al Alvarez is, famously, the person who befriended Sylvia Plath during her last days, going on to write The Savage God, a study of suicide. Of course, there’s a lot more to the man than that: he’s a poet, champion of other poets, poker player, amateur climber and more – as these essays demonstrate.

Many have appeared earlier in the NYRB, among other publications. And though each one is singularly well-crafted and written, to collect all together is to make the whole a mixed bag that flirts with the theme of "risk taking". Profiles of pianist Alfred Grendel, entrepreneur Torquil Norman and Philip Roth sit side-by-side with Alvarez’s views on Andrew Marvell, and John Berryman (among others) which rub shoulders with thoughts on poker and other risk-taking activities.

A hunt and peck approach, then, is called for to locate pieces of interest – some of which are the profile/interview of Philip Roth, meditations on the genteel state of British poetry, an assessment of Alice Munro and his thoughts on Plath’s biographers. It ends with a rather sweet piece on the Grateful Dead – which, ironically, smacks of the same gentility that Alvarez so abhors in poetry.

Worth your while? Find a bookshop with a comfortable place to sit and you ought to be able to read the pieces of interest without having to buy the whole thing.

Nothing Fishy About It

SALMON FISHING IN THE YEMEN Paul Torday

Some novels tell stories through diary entries. Some, through e-mails. Some, though letters. Salmon Fishing in the Yemen uses all of these, in addition to interrogations, newspaper reports and more. What ought to have been a shapeless hodge-podge is instead a charming first novel.

It deals with the London-based Dr Alfred Jones, a fisheries scientist, asked to implement a project at the whim of an influential sheikh to introduce the pleasures of salmon fishing to the citizens of the Yemen. Also involved is the charming Harriet, working as consultant. Though Dr Jones pooh-poohs the idea, the Prime Minister’s director of communications sees this as a way to divert the media’s attention, showcasing Anglo-Yemeni cultural and scientific co-operation. Subplots involve Dr Jones’ strained relationship with his career-obsessed wife and Harriet’s concern over the fate of her boyfriend, a soldier in the Iraq.

As a satire on the habits of media-savvy politicians, it works well; as a novel, there’s no denying that most characters are a bit flat and the narrative devices wear thin after a while. (Perhaps to offset this, Torday opts for a farcical and then bittersweet ending.) Adjust your expectations, and it’ll make for a diverting evening.

Worth your while? Yes, if all you’ve been reading lately are novels dealing with the existential angst of alienated characters at war with soulless universe.

Black Literature

CHRISTINE FALLS Benjamin Black

Baffled, middle-aged Irishman confronts the ghosts of his past in a lyrically-written account peppered with dark revelations. Sounds like a new book by John Banville – only, this is a mystery novel written by debutant Benjamin Black (whose real name, by the way, is – er – John Banville).

Set primarily in 1950s Dublin, Christine Falls introduces us to pathologist Garret Quirke who discovers, late one drunken night, that his pediatrician brother-in-law is falsifying the death certificate of a young woman who’s died during childbirth. His investigations lead him to the “confusion, mistakes, damage” related to his deceased wife, daughter and members of his extended family, all centered on a Catholic orphanage in Boston.

Since this is Banville, after all, the prose is a delight: superbly-crafted sentences revealing interior and exterior landscapes that, at times, afford an almost sensuous pleasure. (The author’s formidable vocabulary, so clearly on display in his other books, creeps in occasionally: consider the word ‘phthisic’, for example.) There is, too, a masterly pattern to the release of information, and the resonances between past and present. Quirke is an interesting and intriguing creation whose befuddlement and melancholy waft off the page.

Worth your while? Perfect for the dark monsoon days that, we’re told, will be here soon.

Lively Lives

WRITTEN LIVES Javier Marias
Translated from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa

Marias says in his prologue to this collection of quirky profiles that he wanted to treat “well-known literary figures as if they were fictional characters” – and he does this through a series of oblique glances at some literary icons. The author insists that nothing here is invented, though he concedes that some episodes have been “embellished”.

And so we have cheeky, affectionate and sometimes sly essays that concern themselves with the sadness of Turgenev and Mann; the silence of Djuna Barnes; the post-gaol life of Oscar Wilde; the death of Mishima; and the poses of Joyce, among others. What he’s doing, of course, is using small entryways to provide potted biographies -- the-profile-as-short-story, as it were.

Somewhat disappointingly, Marias isn’t too interested here in the prose and concerns of these writers, but speaks instead of how events (some well-known, others not) and traits have influenced their lives. There’s no academic posturing: for instance, the essay on Kipling forgoes any debate of whether he’s an unabashed colonialist or not. He saves the best for last, however: the essay on writers’ images is quite delightful.

Worth your while? Not to be taken too seriously, which makes it a perfectly agreeable companion during long commutes.