Specimen Days

Specimen Days, much like The Hours before it, consists of 3 separate yet intertwining stories at the heart of which is the poetry of Walt Whitman. I should start by saying that I’m not particularly interested in poetry, so before this I hadn’t read anything by Mr. Whitman. And this book, though I enjoyed it, did nothing to spark my interest in the poet. Also, I definitely would choose The Hours over this any day, but probably because, at the time, I felt some kind of personal connection with it which I still can’t completely shake off. If anyone asked me about my favorite books, The Hours would be in there, so this was a tough act to follow; in fact, until reading Dragos’s post on the book, I didn’t really want to read another book by Mr. Cunningham for fear of being disappointed. But this is all really personal, and probably has nothing to do with literary value

These 3 stories happen in 3 different historical moments: past (late 1800s), present (early 200s) and future (some 150 years in the future) but in the same place: New York. A slightly different ode to the city than the ones Paul Auster usually practices, but an ode nonetheless – ode to permanent transformation, to the city’s ever-changing face and to the lives that feed it every day. Throughout the stories we encounter the same character types: a man (Simon in all 3), a woman (Catherine, Cat and Catareen) and a little boy (Lucas, Luke and Luke ), all caught in a never-ending cycle of destruction, loss, hardship and alienation.

In the machine – the first story has a 13-year-old boy at its center: Lucas. He takes his brother’s (Simon) place at the factory, after the machine caught and mauled his brother to death, thus becoming the sole breadwinner of the family. At the same time, he tries to protect his brother’s fiancée, Catherine, on whom he’s always had a crush and, though the unwillingly spouts verses from Walt Whitman, he does see a deeper meaning in them; he understands that despite the conditions he lives in, there still is great beauty in the world. In the end he saves Catherine from a fire at the company where she worked, but only by paying the ultimate price. This rising industrial backdrop reminded me of a Jack London story I once read and which, at the time (I must have been 12) impressed me a lot. Wonder what it was called….

In The children’s crusade Cat is a member of a police taskforce who receives calls from all the „loonies” who threaten to kill or blow people up and whose job is to identify what is worth investigating. When she misinterprets a phone call from a child, a bomb explodes somewhere in the city, killing a man. Before they can get to the bottom of it all, a second phone call is followed by a second bomb. The little terrorists quote Walt Whitman, justifying their actions by saying that they will return the world to a previous order. The third child comes to kill Cat, but he is not as convinced of his mission and she ends up taking him in. Not wishing to see him handed to the authorities, she runs away from her job and too-good-to-be-true boyfriend and takes the child to start a new life. Since he has no name, he says he’d like to be called Luke, like Cat’s other (now dead) son.

In Like beauty Simon is a humanoid machine (like the Jude Law character in A.I.), Catareen is a lizard-like alien who has found refuge on Earth and Luke – the little boy they find while being on the run from the corporations that now control the west of the US. It a post nuclear future (Jericho?) but not only; it’s the age of a new type of racism, of new beings to discriminate against, a new age where a robot can have romantic feelings of an alien.

There are a lot of elements that go through these stories, uniting them closely: the characters reflecting one another, the buildings and their changing functions, events that are now history (in the second story the fire at the company where Catherine worked is mentioned; while in the third story we find that the children’s crusade was a nation wide event) and, of course, Gaya’s store and the mysterious white bowl that passes through all the characters’ hands like a mark of the damned.

On a side note, my favorite Scissor Sisters song (and when I say favorite I actually mean “the only one I remotely like”) was inspired by the book, because the lead singer is a fan. It’s called Other Side (and the Doctor Who clip is the only one I found).

Shakespeare

I couldn’t say I’m a fan of Bill Bryson’s – Shakespeare being the first book I ever completely read; but, having started A short history of nearly everything (I stopped at page 100-and-something and the fault is 100% mine), I could guess I’ll probably become a fan soon enough. I really like his style: it’s very matter of fact, direct and funny at the same time, without much stylistic flourishing. He manages to separate what is essential, from what is either speculation or from what would need in-depth study – a quality I appreciate immensely (you’d think it’s easy, but I know a lot of people who have a hard time discerning the main idea of a text/discussion). Plus, his books are informative and well researched, so it makes for a pleasant and instructive read.

I’m not exactly into biographies – I concede they are very interesting (some, anyways) but I can’t seem to get motivated to delve into them; I’d rather drift off into some imaginary world. So I started the book with almost zero background knowledge on Shakespeare; by the end of it, I can’t say I’ve particularly expanded my academic horizon; but at least I understand the context a bit better. It’s a good starting point either to make you curious to dig deeper into the Bard’s life (yes, I had to use the bard title at least once ) or if you’re like me and just want the big picture. The main thesis is not to describe Shakespeare’s life, but to point out how little truth we actually know of him or his contemporaries and how, even with the scarcity of facts, we happen to know a lot more of him than say Marlowe or Ben Johnson. This review in The Telegraph criticizes the lack of focus on the plays; personally, I didn’t mind since I didn’t come to this book for textual analysis or interpretation. Overall, you get a feel of the age and you get to have fun with a selection of crazy Shakespeare was someone else theories.

My “huh?” moments:

-         The face we know as Shakespeare may very well be some random guy.

-         What we truly know about his life could probably fit in a page. The thousands of books written are highly speculative. Shakespeare’s first biographer, Nicholas Rowe, wrote in his 1709 Life 11 pieces of information, 8 of which are false.

-         Shakespeare had 6 known signatures – all of which are different. Funnily enough, the name we use today is not one of them.

-         Elizabethan entertainment: horse riding chimpanzees chased and devoured by dogs. Had it not been for the animal protection agencies, we would have a reality show about that…

-         The term box-office once described an actual office where the box with the day’s theater earnings was stored. How very…literal.

-         Shakespeare at his worst borrowed almost mechanically- a passage in Henry V is taken more or less verbatim from Holinshed’s “Chronicles”.

-         A couple of words that were actually invented by S: dwindle, hereditary, excellent, assassination, zany – overall, a total of over 300. Plus expressions that we use on a daily basis (some of them turning into clichés): vanish into thin air, play fast and loose (seriously?), budge an inch, foul play, flesh and blood etc.

-         The mass appeal theaters had in the age.

-         Hamlet, for example, exists in 3 versions: 1603 & 1604 quartos and the 1623 folio. It’s not an isolated case; most plays as we know them now have been “reconstructed” based on several sources.

-         In 1840 PT Barnum had the idea to put Shakespeare’s home on wheels and have it tour the US. It was the push needed by the British authorities to turn it into a museum.

-         More famous proponents of the “Shakespeare was not really Shakespeare” theory include Freud, Orson Wells and John Galsworthy. Their preferences regarding the real author vary.

The White Tiger

All I wanted was the chance to be a man – and for that, one murder was enough.

The White Tiger is an Indian success story, a model for local entrepreneurs and start-up dreamers – or so would Balram, our narrator and main character want you thinking for the first page or so. It quickly becomes obvious that it is, in fact, a story of extreme poverty, corruption inhumanity and murder. The social gap between East and West, between India and Europe (or India and fellow Asian Japan) is quite staggering. To think that this one country, a rising economy, contains about one sixth of the world population, a high percentage of which lives in The Darkness makes you wonder if it won’t eventually implode – like anything else built on an unsound foundation.

The contrast drawn between the darkness (mainland India, villages around the river Ganges – where Balram is born) and the light (coastal India, the big cities – Delhi, Bangalore, Mumbai) is stark; but then again, there’s contrast even within the light: malls, office buildings, a whole “Electronics City” standing alongside widespread slums. Of course, none of this is actually news – but well-known facts about the world we live in; but to immerse in this world, even through a book, can be somewhat hard to digest and can certainly throw a new light on your own lifestyle.

Balram is by no measure an extraordinary character. His destiny is that of millions from the lower casts, a life of poverty, illiteracy and servitude to masters and elders of his family (Granny is quite the character; it would be easy to judge her as an evil witch on first sight, but if you delve deeper into her own background, you can see she hasn’t much choice but to be this way; it’s not a land where grandmothers make cookies and tell stories by the fire). As his US educated master would say, Balram is a half-baked man, but you can’t really hold that against him. The irony of fate is that, in order to become a man (a free man, on his on feet, as his father had once hoped he would), he has to slay another.

The tale of how he came to murder his master is put forth through letters he writes to China’s premier, Wen Jiabao, after hearing of his impending visit to India (of course, they are nothing but a literary device). In doing so, he describes many of the social injustices that have been infringed on him (or the likes of him), the corruption that flaws any aspect of public service (government, public health & education systems, elections etc), and his burgeoning thoughts of revenge in a darkly funny and straightforward manner. Sure, perhaps some characters are sketchy and somewhat grotesque (the other driver in Buckingham towers, the men shitting at the entrance in a slum) – but this doesn’t steal much from the authenticity of other episodes. It’s a bit like Crime and Punishment, but without the crippling guilt (which actually is the whole point of Crime…); Balram feels his killing was justified, he feels he’s been enlightened enough to see the bars of his cage of servitude and, in doing so, he sacrifices his entire family to escape (the remaining relatives of his master will have killed them).

Though insisting the big city corrupted him, Balram was never exactly an epitome of morality. The more he learns of the world, the more choices he has to make – and he usually makes them for his own advantage, not for any higher sense of righteousness or duty (denouncing a colleague’s Muslim faith in order to get ahead in a household he knew despised Muslims, not sending money to his family, calculating which attitude would bring him most advantage etc). So he is not “fallen” he is just a man who’s learnt what he was allowed to, and who one day rebelled.

My favorite metaphor was definitely the rooster coop, symbolizing the mindless enslavement of the lower castes: they are all aware of their fate and take it as is, without ever entertaining the possibility of change – just like chickens before the slaughter. This is really all that sets Balram apart.

By no means a perfect book (it starts off strong and then wavers a bit towards the middle and end), Mr. Adiga’s debut won him the Booker last year. I assume there’s got to be a bit of pressure on him to deliver the second time around and, personally, I’ll be looking out for his next book, since I definitely enjoyed this one.

Reviews: The Guardian, India Today, The Telegraph (-> I’m not so sure about their real India; but I liked what Mr. Adiga said in an interview: I simply wrote about the India I know, the one I live in. It’s not “alternative India” for me! It’s pretty mainstream, trust me)

A study in scarlet

Being spurred on by the movie coming out this December (which I’m still really anxious for, despite the awful tagline) and by the fact that the book was on sale – I had my first literary encounter with Mr. Holmes. Sherlock Holmes. And it was quite fun – up to a point at least

A study in scarlet is the first novel to feature Sherlock & Mr. Watson, and I really enjoyed getting first hand character descriptions. The detective is not at all like I imagined – I think I saw him as a bit of a gruff Poirot, but I liked his hands-on approach and his scientific background. Of course, just like Poirot, he’s all too conceited and impressed with himself, but at least it’s for good reason.

So after reading about 30 pages in the morning on my way to work, I couldn’t wait to get back home and see what happens next. However, I was pretty disappointed by the long backstory dedicated to our murderer and his motives – the wild west setting, the evil Mormons plot (with a special appearance by real life prominent Mormon Brigham Young) – it was all fairly dull and slightly sappy. Plus, Mr. Holmes makes things sound a bit too easy – I’d like to read more with him struggling harder to crack a case; so if anyone can promise me no more wild west stories, I’d give Sir Doyle another go

And speaking of sirs, I’ve seen a pretty funny interview with Salman Rushdie in Craig Ferguson’s show – plus, he talks a bit about his impending visit here (and Dracula’s castle, of course)

Nejimaki-dori Kuronikuru [The wind-up Bird Chronicle]

October seems like my Murakami month. A year ago, around the same time, I was reading A wild sheep chase, and now I finally decided to give The Wind up bird chronicle a try. In fact, a friend went on holiday in Japan and, as I saw photos and heard the stories, I had a sudden urge to read this book. What I like about Murakami (and what I assume is the source of his mass appeal) is that he is a writer of the modern, westernized Japan. Not to judge whether it’s a good or a bad thing, but he is certainly much more accessible than..say…Yukio Mishima or Kobo Abe – more accessible and more relatable, while still holding on to bits of the Japanese tradition.

Now…about this bird chronicle – I should start by saying that it seems overtly ambitious, quite self-aware, occasionally repetitive and thus too long. That’s for the bad part – the good (because there is good, no doubt) is that the subject matter is quite interesting, the characters and intriguing, though slightly contrived, the twists are indeed unexpected and Mr. Murakami tries to exhaust as many narative devices as possible: flashbacks, letters, internet conversations, newspaper inserts, dream sequences, point of view shifts etc.

Toru Okada (later nicknamed in the book Wind-up Bird), our perfectly average and seemingly uninteresting hero leads a dull life in a nice Tokyo neighborhood. When he loses his job, his wife Kumiko willingly becomes the sole breadwinner of the family, supposedly until he decides which path to pursue. But, eventually, this will not be up to him; as, starting with the disappearance of this cat, Noboru Wataya (named after Kumiko’s brother) a whole range of oddities will cross his path. A few weeks after Kumiko will leave him too, and will reveal, through a letter, that she had an affair with another man – affair which is now terminated, but this doesn’t affect her decision to get a divorce. Okada is not convinced; he feels that somehow Kumiko was forced into this decision – and that his brother-in-law, a powerful politician and media figure – is somehow involved. From then on, his only purpose is to find her, and along the way he meets all sorts of colorful and surreal characters.

First there are the Kano sisters; Malta and Crete (named after the islands) who are supposedly helping him find his cat. While Malta is the one to contact him, he will eventually develop a more intimate relationship with Crete who will share her life story (which includes, but is not limited to, suicide attempts and prostitution – both of the spirit and of the body) with him. May Kasahara, his teenage neighbor, will also come to play a part in his life. Initially a distraction in the long afternoons when he had nothing else to do but wait for his wife, she will become an eerie presence during his stay in the fountain (I’ll get to this later ). May is not in school by choice; she does field work for a wig company (classifying men she sees on the street according to the percentage of hair loss) and she spends most of her day tanning. Their conversations range from meaningless chit chat to her recurring thoughts about death. She will move, but we get to read her letters to him – letters filled with a mix of angst, acceptance boredom and, of course, death – which explain a bit more about her character: she has unwillingly caused the death of a boyfriend in a motorcycle accident form which she escaped with minor bruises. Then we move on to Nutmeg Akasaka (and her son Cinnamon, who has refused to talk since he was 6) – her life story is, again, captivating and odd, marked by loss: her father was a vet at the zoo** in Hsinking in Manchukuo and he died there, her husband was murdered in a most atrocious way, her lost her first all-consuming passion (fashion design) only to discover that she had a medium-like gift.

Now….about that fountain. Lt. Mamyia, an acquaintance of Toru’s, tells (in person and through subsequent letters) his WWII story – the battle of Nomohan, an ill-fated incursion in Mongolia, years spent in a Siberian labor camp – and the defining (and possibly the most disturbing) incident is his 2-day imprisonment in an abandoned well. Saved by sheer luck he will spend another 8 years on the continent – and will return to Japan as a shell of his former self. The war trauma is too intense and, with nothing left to lose or gain, Mamyia will feel stuck for the rest of his life. Easily my favorite part of the book, his story is also a cautionary tale regarding the damages of knowing one’s destiny before it’s come to pass. Inspired by this, Toru will find a fountain in the garden of an abandoned house (a hanged man’s house, surrounded by urban legend and superstition) and will proceed to spend a few days at the bottom, with only a bottle of water. May’s obsession with death will push her to rid him of all possible means to get out of the well – and this will force him, through the hardships he endures, to be aware of himself and those around and to become somewhat psychic. The lucid dreams thus induced will lead him to an out of body experience to a room where, seemingly, his wife is being held captive (either physically or spiritually) – the immediate outcome of which will be a dark mark on his face.

While taken separately all the stories are captivating – when put together, they don’t make a particularly coherent unit. Coincidences – the Manchukuo experience shared by Nutmeg and Mamyia, the dark spot on the face shared by Toru and Nutmeg’s father, Noboru Wataya’s relationship with Creta Kano, the sound made by this wind-up bird whenever something significant happened in our characters’ lives – remain nothing more than that: simple coincidences, and the final chapters of the book fail to bring closure to most of the narrative threads.

For actual reviews – NYT & Salon.

**the zoo massacre episode reminded me a lot of a Russian book I read as a child. I think my copy was published sometime in the 60s (at the time I was impressed by how old it was); and it was about a zoo worker and her experiences with animals – how she adopted a baby lion, how she tried to protect others, the impact an air raid had on the zoo….My memories are a bit blurred, I must have been about 10 when I read this – but does this ring a bell to anyone? I’d like to remember at least the author

Endless nights (and 2 other things from last week)

My very first comic book (graphic novel?) was Endless Nights – and I wanted it only because it’s written by Neil Gaiman. In fact, I’ve wanted all the Sandman collection for quite a while, but when I was about to get started on it, I found out that the first 3 volumes were not available in the store. Sure, I’ll be ordering them soon, but in the meantime, a friend got me Endless Nights as a birthday present. And I have to say – I’m not so sure it was a good idea .  I completely loved the book, but now that I’ve had a taste of it, I want Sandman even more

Endless Nights is composed of 7 chapters, each dealing with one of the Endless, and each illustrated by a different artist. My favorite was the chapter about Dream – how he falls in love with a mortal only to get his heart broken, a story told by Sol (the sun) to a still sleeping Earth, with art by  Miguelanxo Prado. Delirium and Despair – while harder to follow and less…comicbooky in design (some of the portraits of Despair feel more like standalone paintings than anything else ) are perfectly chosen to illustrate the two states – anthropomorphized or not. All in all,  a very, very pleasant surprise.

On a purely nostalgic-for-my-childhood note (and completely unrelated to anything else), 1976-2009 – is just too short a time for a life.

And now, for something completely different: since around this time we are celebrating 40 years of Monty Python, I thought I’d leave you with one of my favorite sketches (actually, hard to pick just one :D )

Bluebeard

Bluebeard, a title borrowed from a classic Perrault fairy tale, might be one of Vonnegut’s lesser works (sure, it’s no Slaughterhouse 5), but I still had fun reading it. The premise – an old man hiding a secret in a locked space around his house and the story that leads up to the reveal – may not be in any way new, but it doesn’t make the book less compelling. Rabo Karabekian, now an old man of Armenian origin now leaving alone in a big mansion in the Hamptons, comes across Circe Berman on his property. The woman – slightly strange and indiscreet, manages to wiggle into an invitation to live in his house. Thus, he finds out she is a famous writer – Polly Madison (some kind of Danielle Steel, I assumed) and she encourages him to write his own life story. So, Bluebeard is born as first person narration, following Rabo’s life history: from his parents’ arrival in America after the Armenian genocide, to his first interest in art, his apprenticeship under famous (and fictional) illustrator Dan Gregory, to his involvement in the Abstract Expressionist movement (alongside real painters – like Jackson Pollok, or fictional ones – like his best friend Terry Kitchen), through his marriages and his retreat from the world after his second wife’s death.

I wish there was more I could say about the book – but it’s pretty straightforward and it lacks the kick and the fantasy twists of Mother Night or Slaughterhouse (these being the only other 2 novels by him I’ve read so far). While Rabo’s history as an artist is odd and funny – culminating with the disintegration of all his paintings because of the bad materials used, the great reveal of his last photographic painting – his return to his illustrator roots and seemingly the only work in which he manages to pour his soul, left me somewhat indifferent. I don’t really think that the „mystery” of the potato barn was meant to be the central point of the novel (despite the title) but it was still unsurprising and a bit disappointing. Circe, as a character, is powerful – perhaps more powerful than Rabo himself – and, with her complete disregard for others’ feelings or opinions she manages to shake up the old man out of his routine and to bring life back to a dieing house. Considering her influence, her name is certainly not randomly chosen.

Disgrace

No country, this, for old men

Disgrace, Mr. Coetzee’s second claim to Booker fame, starts rather inconspicuously with an affair between a professor in his late 50s (David Lurie) and his 20 year old student (Melanie Isaacs). When the affair turns sour, he is denounced and forced to resign his post at the university. This happens throughout the first third of the book, and you expect the rest of it to be about this transgression – and possibly more others to form a shady sexual past. Perhaps compelling, but also common. Mr. Coetzee however thwarts any mediocre expectations and, when he sends David to visit his daughter Lucy, who is living on a farm in rural South Africa, he makes the novel about alienation, revenge and sacrifice and a torn post-apartheid RSA. Lucy is David’s daughter from his first marriage; though a city girl (for a while she even lived in Holland with her mother) she chooses life in the country, chooses to grow flowers, vegetables and dogs. While she takes David in as a guest after the scandal, an attack on the house by 3 black men in which she is gang raped, he is set on fire and a lot of her possession are stolen awake in the man his long unexercised paternal instincts. Lucy is shocked to the core by what happened to her and falls in depression, while he tries – mostly unsuccessfully, to keep things together. Their mostly ambiguous relationship with Petrus, a black man initially hired by Lucy as help, but who has now started to move up and put together his own farm and whom David suspects had a hand in the attacks, wanting to intimidate the woman and force her to abandon the land only adds up to the strain on the father-daughter relationship. David doesn’t understand (and here I must concur with him) why Lucy wouldn’t want to leave the place that caused her such grief, why she would make any sacrifice, even that of dignity, to stay there and finally, why she will not give up the baby that will be born as a consequence of the rape. But, though he doesn’t understand and though he tries his best to change her mind on any aspect, in the end he decides to be there for her and he moves in the city nearby – a sense of selflessness and devotion that is quite moving.

The title word is a state in which, at some point, most of the characters live: David, when he is practically chased out of Cape Town and oncemore as he cannot do a thing to help his daughter, Lucy, after her rape and, in David’s opinion, once she refuses to come out with the full story and even the dogs that Bev Shaw puts down. Disgrace – when there is nothing else left. For David, it turns out to be a journey which mirrors his Byron opera – starting off as a classical piece and ending up a distorted, one-note lament by the abandoned.

My best friend, who read the book before I did, pointed out that Mr. Coetzee’s characters are unlikable, that they don’t really command sympathy. At the time, I took this to mean that they are evil or amoral, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized she is probably right. You don’t like, you can’t really embrace any of his characters – but you can find redeeming qualities in any of them: David’s love for his daughter or the magistrate in Waiting for the Barbarians eventually standing up for those without any hope. Come to think of it, both are old men leering and lusting after young flesh – which is what brings both of them down eventually. From rock bottom, the only way to go is up. Even so, David’s motivations are perhaps the easiest to understand, his psyche is easiest to slip into. Why Lucy chooses to stay, accepting a rather degrading pact with Petrus, why Mr. Isaacs invites his daughter’s supposed molester to dinner – these choices belong to a realm of logic, sentiment of justice which I am not privy to. The more I think about it, the more it strikes me that David Lurie might as well be a toned down, tame version of the magistrate (in Waiting for the Barbarians).

While I really enjoyed reading this – and while it’s widely accepted that it’s Mr. Coetzee’s best work to date, I can honestly say that, for me, the best one was Waiting for the barbarians. At time I read it (more than a year ago) I was quite ambivalent towards it, but looking back, its questions and emotions stayed with me and, unconsciously, it turned out to be the yardstick by which I measure any other of his novels. But at least now I know I really like Mr. Coetzee’s works

The movie, starring John Malkovich came out in 2008 (but as far as I know, failed to make a big impression, and I’ve yet to see it) and you can find book reviews at NYT, Salon or London review of Books.

The invention of solitude

So…lots of literary awards last week last week as both the Nobel (cue accent on Romanian born writer by the Romanian press) and the Booker (when I first heard historical novel, I was a little put off, but the prospect of Oliver Cromwell? That is strangely enticing.) were awarded. [I had a link on the peace prize Nobel too, but I figured staying out of politics is just wiser ]

And this morning I finished JM Coetzee’s Disgrace – of which I will write in a future post, since I haven’t yet had a chance to write about Paul Auster’s The invention of solitude. I picked this up running around in a Paris airport, looking for something to read when The Road ended. It wasn’t much of a choice, really – among the dan browns of the world, I went straight to this. I can’t say I’d ever given much thought to Paul Auster the man except acknowledging that he lives in Brooklyn and most of his characters roam about the same neighborhood. Plus, the usual author photo at the back of some of his books made me expect a man with a secret, a dark and brutal past and a cynical sense of humor – I think it must be the eyes. But, while sometimes too longwinded, it has been a pretty enlightening and gripping memoir.

The first part, The invisible man, is triggered by his father’s abrupt death. While rummaging through all the things he kept in the house where he had spent the last 15 years of his life alone, Auster reminisces on his father’s days as a landowner (slumlord, Auster says) and as a mostly absent father – perhaps not physically absent, but seemingly never particularly interested in his children’s lives, and thus not leaving behind the emptiness that a parent’s demise should leave. Coming to terms with his life, trying to understand him seems futile after death, but it’s a good exercise for the left behind son. His family’s history, very tabloid-like, with his grandmother shooting his grandfather in front of one of the sons and the ensuing trial is revealed through a coincidence, and a ripped photo that now has an explanation finds it way on the first page of the book. The coincidence and the significance of seemingly unrelated events – something invariably found in Mr. Auster’s novels, might have roots in this personal history; the same goes for the shady past of most of his characters. There’s something…noiresque about this whole story, although the grandfather wasn’t much of a leading man, nor was the grandmother a femme fatale.

The second part, The Book of Memory, though still autobiographical and written while dealing with divorce and separation from his own son, is written in the 3^rd person, with the author referring to himself as A. While at first slightly annoying and pretentious, eventually you slip into the rhythm and stop focusing on this detail. This time it’s not a straightforward narration, but seemingly unconnected paragraphs with subtitles like Second return to the belly of the whale or Further commentary on the nature of chance. Once again, coincidences, a subject matter very close to Auster – and the one that sticks out for me was the story of the young man who lives in Paris, in a small chambre a bonne. When he writes to his father about his lodgings, he finds out it’s the same room where his father his during WWII, before emigrating. Auster gives a lot more meaning to events such as this – he sees a greater picture than most of us, sees things repeating themselves endlessly. Another favorite subject broached is Collodi’s Pinocchio, vs. Disney’s Pinocchio (vs. Jonah and the whale) – the boy as image of the author, the depths missing from the onscreen adaptation (namely the explicit motivations found in the second) etc. Comments of prophecies and false prophets (Cassandra, Jonah in Ninive), on Van Gogh, on Hölderlin’s poetry – you can find them all here. Plus, scenes from his life in Paris, scenes from his child’s life, and even more coincidences. It may seem disjointed and scattered, but in the end, it’s the book of memory and memories are nothing if not disjointed.

The Times review – here.

The Road

Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it

I wanted to read this before the movie came out - and what started as a task I had set for myself ended up impressing me way beyond any expectation. I read it on the plane to Lyon and back and I broke away from it only to tell my friend how, with every page, I couldn’t see any glimmer of light or color for these people - and at the end, I could barely contain my tears.

I wouldn’t use the word masterpiece (which, of course, can be found on the back cover blurbs), but this seems to me a perfectly constructed book: the sparse language to match the dull nothingness the two travellers find on the road, the understanding between them way beyond the few words they actually exchange, and the landscape – the all powerful, all encompassing barren landscape, which just might be the main character in the end.

I’d seen a few days before an interview with Viggo Mortensen (who, btw, is perfect casting as the father) in which he was saying that if there was no connection between him and the kid, no matter how well either of them acted, the movie would fall flat. Looking back, it makes perfect sense now, since the driving force of the book is the father – son bond, created not through words or promises, but through years (3, at the start of the book) of walking across a desolate, burnt country. It may be a journey of becoming for the son, but it’s not a road trip punctuated by excitements temptations and some big revelation making a point for spiritual growth, but  a daily struggle for a little more of a life where nothing good might ever happen again.

The cataclysm that reduced everything to ash is never known – nor is the reason they survived, but its consequences are just a state of fact that needs to be accepted simply because there is no other alternative. For the child, this is all he’s ever known – and the stories his father tells (of happier and richer times) are starting to have no meaning for him. In the end, they don’t really need words, because most of what these words depicted is now extinct.

This is the first book by Mr. McCarthy I’ve ever read – and it’s been quite the experience. I might try something else eventually, but I have to say I’m afraid of being disappointed.

A bunch of reviews:   Dragos, Capricornk, Anda, NYTimes, Slate. Read the book first – don’t wait for the movie