2019 Books
Carlos Somoza: El Origen Del Mal
Careful, literary suspense novel set with parallel stories today and during the 30s – 50s Spain/Morocco/Algeria. Lovely storytelling, with strong themes woven throughout: the primacy of written word, experience of writer and reader; history and whether we are authors or role players; what it looks like to be “inside” the Fascist regime, loyalist vs. “enlightened” republicanism/communism; tension of Spanish and world colonialism, “west” vs. Islam; friendship vs. ambition.
2018 Book Reports
Homer: The Odyssey (new translation by Emily Wilson)
What to say… robust, entertaining, violent, inconclusive. I liked War Music more (a version of the Iliad).
Phillipp Meyer: The Son
100 years of a Texas family, interactions with Comanches and Mexicans. Narrative jumps generations and becomes a kind of circular rhythm. Beautiful places and interior dialogue—the author moves smoothly from first person to third person indirect style. Tragedy of the American experiment/human experiment of land and conflict, family and independent action.
Daniel Alarcon: At Night We Walk in Circles
Quiet and devastating, a different mode of novel: the narrator is a journalist, picking up the facts and interviewing people close to Nelson, a rather innocent young actor who gets caught in downward-spiraling events. The subject in the end confronts the narrator, denies him any entry to Nelson’s own version of events.
James Wood: Upstate
A quiet novel of the adult relationships of father to daughters. The father is an optimist, he admits late in the story to his depressive, introspective daughter—though not without his own misgivings and missteps. You get the sense though that the story could have been longer, could have been more searching. What is Wood trying to convey, and does he succeed? I think he’s trying to get inside a familiar case study that maps to any number of family relationships of our time, trying to describe the points of connection between individuals amidst the backdrop of our fast-moving time. (The novel is set in 2008, pre-Obama, and pre- social media takeover.) The father is secondary to the romantic interests of the daughters, and he lives in juxtaposition to their mother who has passed 10 years earlier, after a divorce during the children’s youth. The novel seems to end too soon, without giving way to further complication or further meaning for the protagonist.
Zadie Smith: White Teeth***
Loved this book. A comedy in the classic sense where things work out, unexpectedly, in the end. Smith has such warmth for her characters in their range of motivations. They seem truly independent, voice their own thoughts in conversation and friction against each other. I have not had this reading experience before: laughing and crying at the same time through the final pages.
Kent Haruf: Our Souls at Night
No wonder Haruf won a Wallace Stegner Award; his writing is reverent to place, and quietly precise on emotional tone, the kernel of a conversation. The story is lovely, happy and finally sad. Why does the love have to limp toward an unsatisfied end, even as it’s been worth the difficulty: “We’ve had a good time,” Louis said. “You have made a great difference for me.” “You’re being cynical now.” [Addie] “I don’t mean to be. I mean what I’ve said. You have been good for me. What more could anyone ask for? I’m a better person than I was before we got together. That’s your doing.” “Oh, you’re still kind to me. Thank you, Louis.”
Philip Roth: American Pastoral
So far I can’t finish. Great Newark history and baseball spirit, but so many words, when a few would be fine to drop in to the story line while maintaining the laden air of suspense: how will the perfect man reveal his flaws?